Sister Healer
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM preslash. Harry and Draco hunt a series of twisted with a grudge against a Healer, and investigate rumors of a new Dark Lord. Fourth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, sequel to Rites of the Dead. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **Sister Healer

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco pre-slash, mentions of OC pairings and Ron/Hermione

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Violence, gore, OC character death, angst, torture.

**Summary: **Harry and Draco find themselves hunting a series of twisted with a grudge against a Healer—or perhaps a series of twisted being used as proxies by someone else, from a distance. How much evidence is there for a new Dark Lord? Fourth in the Cloak and Dagger series, sequel to "Rites of the Dead."

**Author's Notes: **Welcome to the next fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, with Harry and Draco as Auror partners hunting dangerous Dark wizards. The series consists of mingled one-shots and longer fics—so far "Invisible Sparks", one-shot, "Hero's Funeral," multi-part, and "Rites of the Dead," one-shot. The one-shots are not strictly necessary to read, but do add to the internal chronology. This story will consist of about nine or ten parts, and be updated every Wednesday evening.

**Sister Healer**

"You're ready."

Malfoy's voice was an inch from his ear, and that still might have been too loud. Harry nodded fractionally, his eyes locked on the doorway in front of them. The twisted they were hunting had proved to have a flaw of extraordinarily keen hearing. He might be able to hear the sweat sliding down Harry's wand where he held it. And he had a hostage, a Healer with his knife to her throat, who he would probably be able to kill before Harry and Malfoy did anything about it, unless they were extraordinarily careful.

The only good thing about having him cornered here, in an abandoned building outside Hogsmeade, was that no one else was likely to get hurt.

_Except the hostage, _Harry thought, and wondered whether the twisted could hear the hair rubbing against his collar.

"Now," Malfoy said, or Harry thought he said—he might just have felt Malfoy's breath against his ear in that shape—and then rose and cast the nonverbal spell they had agreed on. The air split with the shrieks of a thousand demented cats. They were hoping the intense noise would disorient the twisted; it was worth a try, since he had killed two times so far because his victims' heartbeats were too loud in his ears.

From inside the building came a scream. Harry blasted the door aside and charged in, Malfoy right at his back.

The building had been a shop, and a few aisles and counters were still standing. Harry took in the scenery with a sweeping glance; he and Malfoy had already used their Patronuses to spy it out through the window.

Yes, there was a pile of splintered wood in front of him that he would have to leap, and a counter not far from the door with chairs in front of it. Harry tapped the small of Malfoy's back in the prearranged signal that everything was as they had thought it was, and then sprinted left, while Malfoy went right.

They were just in time. The twisted always had companions, people or beasts they had conjured or enslaved, and the first of them was pounding after Harry, an enormous black dog running in perfect silence, except where the iron teeth smashed together. Harry leaped for cover behind the pile of wood, and the dog's teeth caught in a board, making the pile collapse. Harry slid on more wood as the twisted screamed again.

The dog rose above him, coming down in a pinpoint perfect motion that a living hound could never have managed.

"_Fulmen!_" Harry spat, and a miniature storm formed right where the dog's belly was. Lightning clawed it apart, thunder rang in its ears, and rain rose from inside it, drowning it. The dog screamed soundlessly and writhed, and fell to the floor, dying.

Another one leaped at him, but Harry whirled to the side, and there was a rope of dark energy where he had been, concealed by his body. It lashed up and around the dog's legs, and it fell with a scream. Harry laughed, and had the feeling that the laugh had sounded a bit mad. That didn't matter. What did was moving, constantly, shifting from position to position, ignoring the dogs who panted behind him as if they were unimportant. And he let out flashes and bangs and booms as he moved, to keep the attention of the twisted with the knife at the Healer's throat firmly on him.

All the better to distract from Malfoy.

Malfoy had claimed that he could move more silently than a shadow. Harry hadn't believed him, but these hounds were all shadow, and Harry could still hear their teeth chopping. He could only see Malfoy, and then only because he knew where to look. He jerked his eyes away in the next second, and hoped that the twisted hadn't been following the motions of his head.

It seemed not. Malfoy arrived at the position they needed, right behind the elbow of the arm that the twisted was using to hold the knife, without him noticing. Then he jabbed forwards with all his might.

In his hand was a slender needle of the kind that mediwizards at St. Mungo's used to take blood. Although the Healers there refused to treat him anymore, and had mostly used magic when they did, Harry recognized it. Some of the more modern Healers preferred it because not many of their trainees could concentrate on the spell that would open skin only to the blood, not the bone.

The needle sank into the twisted, and the blood began to flow. The twisted, a big man with matted brown hair and blue eyes that had never been clear, gaped around, not seeming to notice where the danger came from.

Or what the danger was. The moment Malfoy had a few drops of the blood, he swept his wand down and broke the needle off. The splinters of shattering glass danced over the twisted's shoulder, and he turned, automatically, to follow the sound. The knife scraped against the Healer's throat, and she made a frightened noise.

Harry took that as his cue, casting the spell he had prepared that severed the knife-holding hand at the wrist. Then he used an invisible rope of air to snare the Healer around the waist and pull her to safety.

The twisted screamed, and Harry thought it likely he would die from loss of blood. But they couldn't take that chance. Five things made up the definition of a twisted: they couldn't use Healing spells; they always had companions; they always had a flaw, a Dark gift of wandless magic; the target had a personal symbol; and they used Dark spells, always, even when others would make more sense. Harry kept moving with the Healer, rolling behind a counter, keeping them out of range of the powerful magic that would pursue them any second.

Malfoy spoke the spell of blood magic he was working aloud, a choice Harry approved of. It let the twisted know where he was, yes, but trying to make sure that a nonverbal incantation worked would take more power, and thus more time. And there was something Harry liked in the irony that a wizard sensitive to sound would be destroyed by it.

"_Cruor trans gladio!_"

The air seemed to spark and ring, and Harry poked his head up above the counter just in time to see the spell come to life. An enormous sword fountained out of the blood in the needle that Malfoy held; it glowed red and had foam running along the sides, as though it had risen from an ocean where a hundred people had died. It swept down, and a moment later, the twisted's head was rolling on the floor.

The shadow hounds—the few that Harry hadn't destroyed—flickered and turned into mere shadows. Harry nodded to Malfoy, and he nodded back.

"Merlin, you _killed _him. You used blood magic."

Harry blinked down at the woman in his arms. He had nearly forgotten about her; she was important, of course, as the hostage that he and Malfoy were in part risking their lives to save, but she was also unimportant. The important thing was killing the twisted, which Socrates Corps had been formed to do. It was impossible to reason with them, and very strict rules applied to their capture, one of which stated that no bystander would be in immediate danger if the Socrates Aurors tried. The Healer herself had meant that death was necessary.

But she stared at him with such horrified eyes that Harry winced. He had forgotten those people outside the Corps wouldn't know what they did, or at least wouldn't look on it as favorably as the Ministry did. And he had never had the best of track records with Healers. He coughed awkwardly and moved back, standing so that she could decide whether she wanted to touch him or not. She ended up taking his arm so she could rise, but let it go in the next instant and huddled back against the counter, shivering.

"Are you all right, madam?" Harry asked, though he didn't know whether she merited the title. She was young enough that she still could have been a mediwitch in training, about Ginny's age, with blonde hair that curled over her shoulders and innocent grey eyes. She looked again at the dead man on the floor, and then back at him.

"Harry _Potter_?" she asked, as if she had never thought that part of Harry's job might be the killing of those he hunted.

"Yeah." Harry swallowed down a throat that felt bruised, and moved away from her so Malfoy could approach. No, he didn't have a good track record with Healers at all. She might even be one of those who had voted to let St. Mungo's ban him and refuse to treat him anymore. It was better to let Malfoy handle her. "Miranda Alto?"

* * *

Perhaps it was because the thrill of battle still rode Draco, but at first glance, the woman he and Potter had risked their lives to save didn't look like much.

Or perhaps it was because, until she moved into the clear light and he could see that her eyes were grey, not green, she reminded him of Daphne.

Draco gritted his teeth at the thought and stepped forwards, bowing slightly as Alto said, "Yes. Why did you do that?" Her gaze found and locked on Draco, and she gave a little blink. Draco wondered if she recognized him or not. If so, he could deal with the usual disdain against Death Eaters, and Potter would owe him later for sparing him the special disdain that Healers had against Harry Potter.

"Kill the man?" Draco asked.

Alto nodded, so focused on him that Draco would have wondered if they had met before, or if she had forgotten about Potter, except that he thought it was probably part of the quality that made her a Healer. She would be tiresome about moral realities as well as wounds, almost certainly.

"He had gone mad from the study of Dark Arts," Draco said. It was the simplest definition of a twisted, minus the five parts that the Ministry had really only deduced by going back and studying the history of Dark Lords. "He couldn't be reasoned with, couldn't be stopped, and our prisons might not have been strong enough to hold him. We've had experience with his kind before."

"He was still _a living human being_."

Draco curled his lips. Yes. Alto was indeed tiresome. She stood before him with her hands on her hips, her face tilted up and full of outrage, as though the man hadn't threatened her a second before. Draco shook his head. He saw no reason that he shouldn't agree with her and take her back to hospital, where her fellow Healers were waiting for her. Agreement was less effort than argument.

He had argued enough with those in his life who would never accept his words, no matter what he said.

"Malfoy?"

Potter, catching his eye and asking silently if the division of labor they had agreed on before the attack still held. Draco nodded, mildly irritated. Kellen Moonborn, his former partner, had never had this obsessive need to check that Draco still wanted the same things he had already said he wanted.

On the other hand, the first case Draco and Kellen had worked together hadn't turned out nearly disastrous, either, unlike the Larkin case. Perhaps he should feel grateful that Potter _wanted _to check with him, instead of charging off into the wild the way he had before.

"Come along, Miss Alto," Draco said, holding out his arm so that she could take it. She looked like the kind of woman who might appreciate those courtesies, like his mother, who she rather resembled.

"It's _Healer _Alto," she said stiffly, but she took his arm, only giving one quick glance over her shoulder at Potter. Draco looked with her and saw that Potter had knelt and drawn a vial from his pocket, to gather some of the blood spilled in the attack. There were Potions masters and magical theorists in the Ministry who were always interested in such things, sure that they would learn someday to identify twisted through their physical composition. Draco thought the Mind-Healers had a better chance.

"Have you worked together long?" Alto asked, as they stepped into the sunlight.

Draco muffled his snort. Of course she wanted to know about Potter; everyone Draco came into contact with did. Even Astoria, Daphne's sister and thus off-limits since the end of Draco and Daphne's betrothal, had written to him asking if it was true that the Savior practiced Dark magic on the sly. Draco had taken some satisfaction in burning that one. The answer was that yes, of course he did, and Draco would have respected him less if he tried to rely exclusively on defensive magic when they were dealing with the twisted.

"Well?"

Alto didn't seem inclined to let it go. Draco sighed and glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She looked like a pure-blood, he thought, classic bone structure and delicate lines of nose and mouth and chin, but he didn't recognize her name, which probably made her a half-blood at best. "Two months," he answered.

"You looked better-coordinated than that."

That surprised a dry laugh out of Draco. "What do you intend to accuse us of?" he asked, as he stepped beyond the wards that had damped Apparition out of the area. "That we must have practiced harder than it seems?"

"I didn't mean to accuse you of anything." Alto frowned at him and pushed her thick curls out of her eyes. "Both of you are extraordinarily jumpy and snappish for men who make a living saving people."

Draco shrugged and glanced around once to make sure there were no Muggles nearby to observe them. He and Kellen had prevented their first case from becoming a disaster, yes, but it had tended that way when Draco nearly Apparated in front of a Muggle he hadn't seen. "Your brother and sister Healers banned my partner from hospital," he said. "The interest you show in him seems hardly neutral."

Alto's eyes clouded with distress. "I wanted no part of that," she said softly. "I argued that we had a responsibility to treat all wizards injured or sick, even if they were dangerous. There are other precautions we could take to make sure that they did not hurt us or other patients. But my brothers and sisters, as you said, disagreed."

Draco shrugged again, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and Apparated, the outer entrance of St. Mungo's firmly in mind. When they appeared in the middle of the alley, Alto released a small breath that sounded like a shriek. "You didn't warn me that you intended to Side-Along me," she said.

"I didn't think I had to," Draco said, and began to walk with such long strides that Alto had to shut up and hurry up. "I thought it obvious it would happen."

Alto glanced up at him with clouded eyes again. "And you are extraordinarily rude, as well," she whispered.

Something tugged at Draco, something cold and low down in his chest. He winced. He had thought that perhaps he was influencing Potter, to be calmer and more polite, instead of resorting to the worst case scenario immediately. But Potter might be influencing him. He waited a few seconds for the impulses to pass, and then spoke quietly and calmly. "I'm sorry, Healer Alto. But you can see why I assumed that the animosity of St. Mungo's might extend to me as well, given that Harry is my partner."

"It need never," Alto said, and held out a hand to him with a gesture like a tendril bowing in the breeze. Draco took it, and found himself pressing his lips to the back of it. Well, and why not? She looked like his mother, she disdained the title of lady but only because she had one that seemed to matter to her more, and she was small and graceful and refined. None of those were adjectives that could apply to Potter, whom Draco had spent the most time with in the past few weeks. "If you are hurt, come to me. I promise, I will heal you. I don't care how much it takes. You saved my life."

Her gaze was bright. Draco found himself bowing again, suddenly glad that he had saved her. She reminded him of other things in life, that he could live and not just work, and that he didn't have to snap and jump like Potter did.

"Does that apply to Harry as well?" he asked. He never called Potter by his first name except in front of others, to test how they reacted to his intimacy with the Chosen One, but he thought he could do it now.

"Yes," Alto said, and gave him a small smile. "As long as we're away from St. Mungo's. I have to make sure that I don't lose the ability to help people _in _hospital, after all."

Draco nodded. Of course he understood. If you had an ally, it never did to undermine the ally's power, and hence the reason why you'd wanted them in the first place. "Thank you," he said softly.

"I should be the one to thank you, since I'm the one who owes you the debt." Alto gave him a sad smile and opened the door. "Though I think, given the lives you lead, that I'll have the chance to return it soon enough."

Draco watched her go, and took a long breath before he Apparated back to the Ministry to begin the paperwork for the case. He often handled it, since his handwriting didn't look like the scrawlings of a drunken spider.

He was still courteous. He still came from a heritage that valued it. It was nice to remember.

* * *

"Did the Potions masters learn anything?"

Harry shrugged with one shoulder, not looking around, and continued with the report he was writing. Some days he could tolerate being partnered to Malfoy better than others, and this was one of the worse days. If Malfoy was going to take _hours _Apparating the Healer back to hospital and then picking up the paperwork they needed, he could have bloody well said so.

But that was only the Malfoy arrogance that Harry reckoned he would never really outgrow, even if the people who had known Malfoy whispered around the Ministry about how much he had changed.

"From the blood," Malfoy said, and laid one hand on the desk, near the framed photograph of Lionel that Harry had brought in from his house. "Did they learn anything from the blood you gathered?"

"I don't know," Harry murmured, keeping his eyes on the words in front of him instead of Malfoy's neatly-trimmed nails. Who cut their nails to that round a curve, anyway? "I imagine it takes rather more than a day to learn about things like that."

Malfoy tapped his fingers. Up and down, tap tap tap, arch arch arch, and no matter how hard Harry tried, his hands would never look that way. It had driven Lionel mad sometimes. He had bullied Harry, once, into taking care of his hands with expensive lotions and scissors for about a week. Harry had done it because he loved him, but all that had happened was him tearing shreds of paper off his reports because he couldn't bite his nails, and Lionel had given up in disgust.

"I know that," Malfoy said. "I simply wondered if they had reported anything."

"They told me it would take a day at least to learn what I wanted to know, and I should go away and stop asking them," Harry said, finally tilting back in his chair so that he could look up at Malfoy.

Malfoy's pale cheeks flushed. Harry had seen everything from the faintest pink flush to a great, rich, scarlet cloak on him now, and he had to admit he enjoyed them all. He didn't fuck blokes, but he liked looking at them. The Ministry could have picked someone worse to partner him with. "You could have mentioned that," Malfoy said.

The fire was out of his tone, so Harry let the fight go with a shrug and turned back to his report. It was almost finished. "You need to sign this, and then I can take it to Okases and file it, and that'll be the end of the case."

Malfoy stared at him. "Since when are you so industrious? It usually takes you at least two hours to write a report."

Harry blinked. _Does he think I didn't notice the amount of time he was away, or does he assume that everyone else is lazy when he is? The way the world revolves around him in his own head, it could be either. _"I've had them," he said. "And I didn't have anyone else chattering away in the background to distract me."

"It's—" Malfoy cast a Tempus Charm, and then stared at the result that floated in front of him as if he had no idea how to read the small numbers.

"Four, right," Harry said, and rose with a stretch. He had hurt something in his back when he fell over that pile of wood to avoid the leaping dog, he thought. He would take it easy tonight. Dinner with Ron and Hermione meant comfortable chairs and Hermione insisting that no one else help her with the meal, anyway. She was determined to prove that she could cook as well as she could do everything else. "You want to sign this?" he added, putting his own name to the report with a flourish and holding it out.

"How could it be four-o'clock?" Malfoy whispered, not deigning to notice him. "I never spent that much time with Healer Alto."

Harry rolled his eyes. Malfoy sounded like George wondering where the time had gone when he was occupied with a project. "I'm sure her conversation was fascinating," he said. "I wouldn't know. I seem to have angered most of the Healers in the wizarding world, for some reason. Anyway." He tossed the report on the desk. "_You _can take it to Okazes, if you want to stay here. I'm out."

* * *

When Potter was gone, Draco sat down behind the desk and ran his fingers over his forehead, checking for signs of a bump or fever.

But when he thought about it, things had taken longer than he thought they would that afternoon, and for good reason. There was—there was the fact that he'd talked with Alto, and watched her go into hospital, and then gone back to the shop where they'd ambushed Jerome only to find Potter already gone, and then talked with a few other Aurors, and then come back in with the files that he had to retrieve.

Yes, it could have gone four before he had known it. He simply hadn't expected that, and so had been a bit unnerved when Potter accused him of lateness.

Draco shook his head. He was still a better, more rules-oriented, less reckless Auror than Potter. He leaned over, signed his name on the report, and then began his own report, to prove it to anyone who wanted to mutely inquire.


	2. By the Second

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—By the Second_

"You can tell your best mate the truth, Harry. What is it _really _like, working with Malfoy?"

Harry snorted and spent a few moments sipping his tea before he answered. He was lounging with Ron in the garden of the small house he and Hermione had bought a few years ago. It was literally a cottage covered with roses and honeysuckle, with a small but sturdy white fence around it and more roses growing in the garden. Harry had once thought he would spend the rest of his life in a place like this.

But—there were reasons that hadn't worked out. And he did think, as he smelled the roses, that it would hurt him in some inexplicable way to live like this.

"Not like working with you, or Lionel," Harry said, and sipped again.

Ron leaned forwards and waved an irritable hand at him. "That's not specific enough!" he all but whined. "I'm sure that you must have had horrible rows and then stomped around sulking in silence for hours afterwards, right?"

"You're coming up with the memories of the time that _we _had rows," Harry reminded him. He knew by now that no fight he and Ron might have was going to be strong enough to sever their friendship permanently, but it did mean that they always followed the same course and Harry would just have to leave Ron alone until one of them was ready to apologize. "I don't think Malfoy would let anyone else see him sulking. He would just give them this cold look and sweep out of the room to leave them to think about their sins."

Ron didn't laugh the way Harry had thought he would. It was a vivid image, and exactly like Malfoy, after all. Instead, Ron leaned forwards, his hands dangling between his knees, and stared at Harry. Harry raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"You sound as though you admire that way of doing things," Ron murmured.

Harry snorted so hard that tea came out his nose and fell back into his cup. Hermione would probably have squirmed in disgust if she was here, but luckily, she was staying late for a Departmental meeting at the Ministry. "Not really," Harry said when he could speak. "I'm the one who inspires that disgust in Malfoy more than often enough, and then it's a bitch to try and get him to talk about anything else for hours."

"I _knew _I had to be right about something!" Ron pointed a triumphant finger at him. "So it _does _last hours."

Harry nodded. "A lot of the time. But when he comes back, he'll ignore everything and pretend it didn't happen. It makes him a comfortable partner to work with some of the time, since I know that he'll concentrate on what we need to talk about, not what he'd _like _to talk about."

"But not as comfortable as me."

Harry blinked and focused on Ron, then felt stupid for not seeing it before. Ron was biting his lip and avoiding Harry's gaze, but his anxiety was there for anyone with eyes to see who looked. Ron was worried that Malfoy was replacing him in Harry's friendship, especially since they no longer worked together as Auror partners. Harry reached out and gripped his best friend's wrist hard, holding him still as he replied.

"I promise, Ron. It's never going to be like the partnership we shared. I can't joke with him. Everything's deadly serious. We fight well together, but how much of a partnership is fighting together?"

"A lot more than ours was, now that you're in Socrates," Ron muttered.

Harry shrugged with one shoulder. "I know, but still, we spent five minutes fighting Jerome—that's the twisted—today and ten hours planning it. It's not that common. Most of the time, we stay in the office and get on each other's nerves."

_And attract each other, sometimes._

Harry shook his head over that last. He was sure the attraction only ran one way; he thought Malfoy looked nice, not the reverse. It was nothing deeper than looks. And even if Harry had wanted to have a chance, Malfoy had been engaged to a woman until recently. Not the best sign.

And even if there was a chance that Harry could be interested in Malfoy for more than his looks and Malfoy could be interested back, Harry was never going to tell his partner he had a crush on him again. Lionel had never completely trusted him after that. They had never worked together as smoothly. And so, Lionel had died. It was a big incident at the end of a tiny series of things they didn't tell each other and not being able to explain their thoughts. Lionel was wary of what else Harry might say, and Harry hurt when he thought of the way Lionel had stepped back from him after his confession.

_Telling the truth is overrated._

"Besides," he continued, knowing Ron would appreciate what he was about to say more than he had anything Harry had said so far, "listen, this is hilarious. Malfoy was supposed to take the Healer back to hospital and go pick up the paperwork while I cleaned the shop where we found Jerome and then went back to the office. He didn't come back until I was almost done writing my report."

Ron stared with his mouth open. "Mate," he said at last. "I know how long it takes you to write a report, remember?"

Harry snickered. "I know. I think Malfoy was stunned that I noticed how long he was _actually _gone. I'm just supposed not to notice when His Majesty has something he wants to do. Noticing how long he's gone and how late he's gone is for lesser mortals."

Ron shook his head. "Well, better you than me, mate." He leaned forwards to tap his cup against Harry's. "I know that I could never work with him."

"Compared to Hale," Harry said dryly, "he's not bad. At least I know that he's not there to spy on me and report every little thing I do to the Minister."

"If you say so." Ron's return look was long and skeptical.

Harry leaned back and reached for the bottle of Firewhisky standing on the table nearby. He didn't want to know what else Ron might be skeptical about.

* * *

Draco sneered at Potter, who came in late the next morning, and reeking of Firewhisky. The problem with sneering at Potter, though, was that he didn't seem to notice. Perhaps he thought that he would never receive anything but sneers from Draco, so any that came his way weren't remarkable. He looked around with wide, sleepy eyes, and then sat down behind the desk and drew a pile of parchment towards him, which he looked at blankly.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Draco asked, unable to contain himself any longer.

"Yes," Potter said, and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Draco assumed he was going to sleep, and reached out, ready to slap the side of the desk and wake him up. Potter took a deep breath, chest inflating as if he intended to float off the chair, and then abruptly leaned forwards and nodded. "Now. You finished all the paperwork last night?"

Draco stared at him. Potter stared back. The sleepy glaze was gone, and he looked as though he was ready to lunge at any evil wizard who might come through the door. Draco shook his head, somewhat in a daze, and leaned back in his own chair.

"Yes, I finished it," he said. "And we only have rumors to investigate today. There's a man that escaped an Auror trap in Scotland, whom they think might be a twisted with the ability to teleport."

Potter rolled his eyes. "Someone always says that when they didn't raise the anti-Apparition wards high enough," he muttered, and then reached for the stack of parchment in front of him and began to sort through it.

"How would you know that?" Draco demanded. "You've only been investigating twisted for two months."

"So have you," Potter said, running a jaundiced eye over him. "What makes me different from you is that _I _went back and read through the old files on the twisted, and their identifying characteristics, and the people that were thought to be twisted and then turned out not to be. And the ways that their existence serves as a handy excuse for incompetent Aurors in other Corps."

Draco snarled at him. "I read those files, too."

Potter swept him a bow from his sitting position. "My apologies. Then what makes me different from you is that I didn't assume you _didn't _read the reports." He went back to writing and comparing some of the notes that Draco knew had been on his desk for days against his copy of the report on the possible twisted.

Draco stared at him, and tried to work out why the lightning was boiling and bubbling in him. He felt rage towards Potter at times, as was only natural for someone whom he had hated when he was a child and who had lied to him on their first case. But he felt it as cold contempt or dusty exasperation. Not this urge to reach out and _hurt _someone.

He thought of the way Healer Alto had spoken to him yesterday, and grimaced. _You'd think that I would be above taking my anger at someone scolding me and displacing it onto an ally._

Then again, there were times that he didn't think of Potter as an ally. Potter fought beside him and collaborated with him and argued with him. With Kellen Moonborn, Draco's first partner, and even the temporary partners he had had during his training, it was more than that. They could laugh together and have moments of quiet understanding.

_And none of them were your rivals during your schooldays. The more amazing thing would be if you _did _have those sorts of moments with Potter._

"Malfoy? Are you going to settle down and work any time this morning?"

Draco turned away and began his labor. He would say something regrettable to Potter if he persisted in thinking about this, and while Potter might be able to get away with anything he did because the relevant people in positions of authority adored him, that didn't mean Draco could afford the same kind of stupidity.

Potter sometimes looked at him throughout the rest of the morning. Draco knew it because he could always feel those eyes. He kept tightening his shoulders and working away, making sure not to glance up.

He would show Potter that he was not unnerved by what had happened yesterday with the Healer, that he was not an imperfect partner, that he was not an incompetent Auror. He would never have thought the day would come when he cared about impressing Potter, but the fact was that he must, at least enough to remain within the Socrates Corps. This was the best promotion that he could hope for, and Potter wasn't going to lose it for him.

* * *

Harry went for sandwiches in a small shop not far from the Ministry, which served them steaming hot and simple. He'd been in places that gaped when he asked for cheese or corned beef or something else that wasn't fancy. This time, he had ham and had just sat down and taken a bite when the vision came rushing at him.

It wasn't as "complete" as some of the other visions he'd had before. He didn't lose track of time and space; he didn't see through the victim's eyes. Instead, he knew that he was sitting at his desk, and he could see the piles of parchment in front of him and the wide, open Socrates office through a wavering curtain of mist.

But he could also see Healer Alto pressed back against the wall of what looked like a potions lab, her eyes wide and her hand held against her mouth, as a menacing presence moved towards her. The presence was a woman, Harry thought, squinting desperately to get the details. Long black hair, absolutely straight, and robes of Healer's green. She must have sneaked into them when she decided to go into hospital, rather than being a real Healer, because shadowy wolves flowed along beside her, and there was a symbol carved into the skin of her right arm, an arrow through a heart. She was a twisted without a doubt, and twisted couldn't use Healing magic.

The woman's head turned, and Harry caught a glimpse of intense blue eyes. He'd seen those eyes before.

The woman held out some kind of long, thin blade, and it stabbed Healer Alto neatly in the chest. Through the heart, Harry was certain. He watched her eyes roll back in her head and her throat quiver, and he swore. He had visions of murders, always visions of murders. Always that and never any other crime.

But sometimes he saw them soon enough to stop them.

Harry flung himself sideways out of his chair so that he wouldn't have to take the time to push it back and ran like a madman towards the door of the office. He didn't know where Malfoy was right now, but he didn't know if he could waste the moments needed to find him. He pulled out his wand and began to concentrate on the memory of his first flight, so that he could summon a Patronus.

Then he bumped straight into Malfoy and slammed back into the wall. Malfoy, whose robes were now covered with the remains of the poncey lunch he'd been carrying—something that seemed mainly made of chicken and eggs—looked down with an expressive face, and then looked back up.

"Healer Alto is in danger from another twisted," Harry said shortly. "Vision."

He expected some bitching from Malfoy, who never seemed to believe in his visions even when he had proof that they could come true, but his face darkened at hearing the Healer's name. "Again?" he asked, shaking his wand into his hand from his sleeve. "That's rather a coincidence, isn't it?"

"I don't think it's a coincidence, but we don't have time to argue about the word right now," Harry said, and kept running. He heard Malfoy mutter a cleaning charm behind him before he followed. Harry rolled his eyes. _I bet he would make sure that he had clean pants on at the end of the world, just like his mother told him._

Then he let the thought blow out of his mind, and concentrated on running. He was sure the room in the vision had been at St. Mungo's, so they would go there first.

* * *

Draco didn't understand everything that Potter had blurted at him, and he didn't know where they were going yet, but he had the essential information, the information that made his breath come short and his heart clench.

Healer Alto. Someone was threatening Healer Alto again, and if Draco hadn't agreed with everything that she told him about killing twisted, at least she was someone who thought he was _important _enough to talk to that way. Not someone who automatically assumed he was a Death Eater whose soul couldn't possibly matter. Not someone who turned her head to the side and ignored him, the way his parents had managed so effortlessly.

He ran.

Potter was heading for the Atrium, he realized quickly, and managed to crowd into the lift beside him before it went down. Potter made way for him without complaining, his eyes closed and his face pale. Draco had seen that expression before. It meant he was studying his "vision" for clues as to what would happen next, and when.

Draco snarled beneath his breath. He had to accept that Potter's visions were real, and that they might be of some use in catching twisted. But their first case had already included a twisted who could manipulate those visions to his advantage and convince Potter that he should commit suicide—heroically, of course, saving Draco, but still. Draco thought Potter relied too much on them and the information they could give him.

Still, a clue was a clue, and Draco didn't want to play around with a Healer's safety. Potter led him straight to the nearest Floo when they reached the Atrium and then came to a halt, cursing.

"What?" Draco knew it couldn't be the lack of Floo powder. That was visible in a bowl on the mantle of the fireplace, right where it should be.

"I can't go into hospital, remember?" Potter's mouth twisted. "Banned. I'll have to stay outside. You go in and find out where Healer Alto is and if she's in any danger. The killing might not have happened yet." He turned towards a second fireplace, Floo powder already in his hand and a name already on his tongue.

Draco opened his mouth to snap that that didn't _matter_, and why did Potter have to make even a Healer's danger about him, and it didn't matter—

Then he flushed. He was usually the one who would have remembered something practical like that, and used it to time their arrival more precisely and send the right person through the fire. Potter was being more pragmatic than him at the moment, something he didn't like to think about. He turned back to the fire, cast in the powder, and yelled as loudly as he could, "St. Mungo's!"

Heads turned all over the Atrium, Draco was sure, but he didn't care. They had already attracted it with their wild run, and people would be more used to it from Harry Potter than from the calm, cool Draco Malfoy. He leaped through the fire, feeling a moment of heat before the flames parted for him.

He tumbled out of a fireplace on the first floor of St. Mungo's, swiping dust and soot from his clothes as he looked around. He could hear sounds from above and below—normal, everyday sounds. No screaming, no sobbing. He swallowed. That might mean that Potter's vision hadn't happened yet.

_If Potter's vision is real._ Potter thought they all were, but he had also admitted that some never happened before, as he thought, he got there in time to save the victim. That must mean they were inherently changeable, and couldn't _all _happen. Not at once.

Draco jogged through the corridors towards the nearest Healer, a tall black woman who had watched him come in and stood watching him with a frown. She seemed familiar, and he recognized her after a moment: Healer Tella, the one who had treated Potter the last time he was actually allowed inside St. Mungo's. She made her way towards him, snapping her eyes around. Looking for Potter, Draco was certain.

He intended to allow her no time for questions. Potter was outside the building and would remain that way. The important thing was getting Healer Alto to safety. "Where is Miranda Alto?" he asked. "We have information that another twisted is after her, and probably means to kill her." He wished now that Potter had been more specific about the content of his vision, but Draco was sure it concerned murder, death. It always did.

Tella took a single breath, then seemed to decide they had more important things to do than ask useless questions. She turned and closed her eyes, then pointed up the corridor towards the nearest flight of stairs. "In the Spell Damage ward. She'll be there all morning, or at least she's supposed to be." A shadow of worry passed over her eyes. She must have seen, and possibly treated, some of the things a twisted's flaws could do, Draco thought.

Draco nodded his thanks, and rushed away. He could feel people's stares on his back, hear them calling after him, and didn't bother turning around. They would only get in his way, and he had someone he wanted to save.

Someone who had looked at him with enough concern to make him feel it, someone who had offered to treat even Potter if he was in need and came to her.

_I'm coming, my lady. _

* * *

Harry arrived in the alley outside St. Mungo's and got immediate confirmation that his vision hadn't happened yet and that they were in time. The woman from his vision was walking calmly up the middle of the alley, surrounded by shadowy forms and with the long, needle-like blade in her hand glowing.

Harry put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

The woman spun around, those intense blue eyes flashing at him. Harry nodded grimly. He had seen those eyes through the face of Julian Okazes, one of his superiors, shortly after the Larkin case, and then they had seemed to belong to another twisted who could take people over from a distance and was angry about Larkin's defeat.

"You're ready?" he asked the woman. He watched the wolves who walked beside her, turning around and snarling at him. They were growing more solid. Harry smiled coldly at them, wondering what her flaw was and not afraid of it. He was going to find out. He was going to kill her, the way that twisted should be killed. Malfoy would probably be here soon. "Let's dance, then."

The woman moved forwards, the sword in her hand rising and falling. The scrape and sing of the blade through the air made Harry have to grit his teeth. He saw no trace of a wand on her, and thought her wand had probably become the blade. That might refer to her flaw; it might not. He didn't know. He leaned forwards and cast a spell that ought to shatter the material of the sword.

It didn't. The blade looked like it was made of glass or the thin metal of a needle, but it must not be. Harry nodded. All right. He could live with that. He edged to the side and cast again, this time a spell that was meant to sweep her feet out from under her and drop her right in the middle of her own wolves.

It didn't work. The woman swayed a little, as though pushed by a strong breeze, but didn't move backwards. And then she thrust her blade at him, and Harry tried to move backwards himself, and found that he couldn't.

He got a Shield Charm up in time to meet the blade, but it rang with a high chime as it slid down the air that the _Protego _had changed and defined, and he found himself shivering in a way that had nothing to do with the impact of the sound against his ears.

_All right. I think I've found her flaw. Once you get in a battle with her, you have to finish it. No method of retreat possible. _He tried to move his feet and found that he could indeed move towards her, but stepping away was as impossible as trying to lift a mountain with his back.

The wolves snarled softly behind him, circling, ringing him, but not trying to approach closer. Harry smiled coldly, and he couldn't have said whether it was at the twisted or himself. Of course it made sense that her companions would be wolves, known for hunting prey with stamina more than speed, and it made sense that the symbol on her arm resembled an arrow through a heart, a target pinned.

_I'm so smart. I can figure out so much about twisted because I've learned so much. That still doesn't mean that I should die fighting her. _

_ Malfoy should be along any minute, and with two of us in the battle, then I don't think her blade and her flaw can overcome us._

_ It has to be that way._

_ It has to._

The twisted made another feint at him, and Harry discovered that he _could _go sideways, and the blue eyes flashed at him, and he barely escaped a cut from the blade, and his attempt at a spell that broke her leg bones didn't work.

_Malfoy should be here soon._

_ Any minute._


	3. A Third in the Twosome

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—A Third in the Twosome_

Draco burst through the door into the room where he thought Healer Alto was and spent some time staring around. His first thought was that Healer Tella might have sent him wrong on purpose, since she knew he was Potter's partner, and she hated Potter. But no, that would be stupid, when she had every reason to believe someone was after Alto.

_If you accept Potter's visions. And why should someone who distrusts him accept Potter's visions? _

Draco cursed himself for wasting time, and turned sharply in the direction of what he thought was an intruder, with his wand out. It was Healer Alto, who reared back when she saw him. She had some scissors in one hand and what looked like a sheet of cloth she was cutting into bandages in the other, and she stared at him as if he was the one who had come to murder her. Draco told himself to lower his wand and to make sure that his voice wasn't very loud when he spoke.

"Healer Alto? I know that you remember me. I'm Auror Malfoy." He tried a cautious smile, but Alto only stared blankly at him and said nothing. Draco sighed. He had probably frightened her. "I'm sorry for coming in here like this, but my partner had a vision that you might be in danger, that a woman in Healer's robes was coming to kill you."

"That's—that would be quite a coincidence." Alto's voice was steady as she laid down the scissors and the bandages on a nearby table and stared at him, but Draco had the strong impression that it was only barely so. "Since the last person who threatened my life was also a Healer."

Draco stared at her. "_Jerome? _The one who had his knife to your throat? But twisted can't use Healing magic. How could he have been a Healer?"

Alto paused, and her eyebrows drew together. "It's true that he had recently stopped coming to hospital," she said slowly. "We thought it was because we could no longer challenge him. He was an extremely skilled Potions brewer. He could have become a Master on his own, not simply a Potions-using Healer."

Draco nodded, reassured. Potions required very little wand use. It was possible that a twisted could use them and still mask his lack of Healing magic. "Then you think that someone else might attack you?"

"I don't—know." Alto's hand fell on the table beside her, and her face went pale. Draco spun around, assuming at first that someone else had come through the door and frightened her, but there was no one there.

"I remember," Alto whispered.

Draco turned back to her, and her face was still pale enough to make him fear that she was going to fall over. He came forwards, his hands held out, and took hers, bowing his head so he could kiss them. "My lady, what is it? What have you remembered?"

He wondered for a hazy moment, like seeing something through a pane of glass, where Potter was. But doubtless he had found and controlled the twisted he had seen. He was a good fighter. Draco wasn't worried for him, as long as he didn't have to fight a long battle. And Potter was full of Dark magic and tricks that ensured no battle he faced would be long.

"There's another Healer who left not long after Jerome did," Alto said, her head bowed and her hands trembling. Draco didn't know if that came from fear or the effort to remember. "I hadn't thought about her because she wasn't a very good student, and I know that she would never have made it beyond mediwitch if she had completed the training. I assumed she would have gone home and found something else to do. But what if she quit because Jerome corrupted her somehow?" Her eyes flew open, and she stared at Draco with seriousness that made his hands tighten in spite of himself, holding on. "I never thought of that. Oh, I should have intervened, I should have made sure that she and Jerome were never alone—"

"You couldn't have known," Draco told her sternly. "And it could be that something else happened, that she drank a potion that twisted her, or that she wanted to come and attack you in revenge for Jerome's death." He didn't know if either was possible, since it still wasn't known how twisted came into being, other than because of insanity from overuse of Dark Arts. "What's her name, this woman who you think would have some reason to hate you?"

"I don't know if reason to _hate _me is enough," Alto whispered, shaking her head. "But she's called Janna Holinshead."

Draco kissed her hands again, and then whirled away and ran towards the door. He could hear Alto taking a step after him, calling with soft urgency, "Where are you going?"

Draco paused and turned to flash her a smile over his shoulder. "Not far," he told her reassuringly. "But I think that Holinshead may be nearby, and now that you've told me her name, I can try to find her." It would be using Dark magic, of course, but he thought Alto would excuse him that if it could save her life. And Potter could probably use the help, wherever he was at the moment.

"You must not!"

A stone wall planted in his path couldn't have stopped Draco any faster. He swung around, gaping at Alto, and found she had assumed a commanding stance, one hand braced on the table and one held out as if she would physically snatch his shoulder and touch him. Draco shook his head, confused. It had been a long time since anyone could make him stop that fast. He would give obedience to the Head Auror or other superiors if he was ordered to, but not that kind of instant, unthinking obedience.

"My lady," he said when he could, trying to keep his voice as gentle as possible while anger was rising up in him, "what—"

"You are going to use Dark magic to find her." Alto was standing with her head lifted up as though she had climbed a mountain and was looking down on the world from the summit. "You are going to put your life and sanity at risk to save _me_, when she hasn't even appeared yet. I don't want you to do something that stupid. You shall not."

Draco took a deep breath. For the first time, he could feel the anger severing the roots of his strange liking for the Healer, waking him up, reminding him that while he was standing safe here, Potter was probably in trouble. "This is the only way I might find her in time to prevent her from hurting my partner."

Alto shook her head. Her eyes were brilliant with tears, and she reached out one hand as though she would touch his arm, then took it back in time. Draco felt a faint pulse of regret. He had already held her hands, even kissed them, but it would have been something different, to feel her reaching out to touch him on her own.

"There are other ways," she murmured. "Other spells. I can show you, as long as you promise that you'll let me cast it."

Looking at her, Draco didn't know how he could deny her. She was trying so hard to protect everyone around her, including him. Although what Draco had done to earn that much consideration from her, especially when he disgusted her, he didn't know. "Try, then."

Alto smiled at him, and then turned to stare at her wand as though it was her partner in some vast conspiracy. She whispered to it, caressing it, and Draco blinked as he watched the wand rise in the air and begin to circle, vibrating. Abruptly it pointed straight ahead, and then Alto reached up, clasped it, and dragged it down from its perch, nodding.

"She is outside this building, in an alley behind it," Alto said, with such a commanding note in her voice that Draco suspected it was probably the one she used for telling patients they should go to bed. "And I think that she is battling your partner. You should probably get on that."

As though released from a spell, Draco shook his head, turned, and began to run. He didn't know why he had stayed there so long now, except that Alto's voice was soft and low and fascinating, and he had accepted that he wanted to listen to her talk. Perhaps—

He had to put the thought away when it occurred to him that he had been here for at least ten minutes already, and that Potter, especially if he was facing a twisted with a flaw as deadly as Larkin's, was unlikely to survive for that long. Draco cursed under his breath and ran faster.

* * *

Harry and the twisted woman were practically pressed up against each other now, dueling with small, sharp jabs of their wands, their bodies protected by flat, glittering shields that seemed to plaster the air in front of them. Harry could feel her breath on his face, and see her eyes. They were not, or no longer, the glittering blue in his vision. Arctic blue, the blue of the creature or person or twisted who had spoken through Okazes, a hard color to mistake.

But had they been blue when he started the fight? Harry didn't remember.

He could feel sweat pouring into his eyes. He would have dearly liked to stop and wipe it, but he knew he would die if he did. He could feel the ache coiled and waiting in his muscles, the exhaustion that would overwhelm him if he let it, the panting rhythm that ran through him and made him want to drop to his knees. In some ways, everything would be easier if he let the woman stab him.

Yes. That would end the fight, and it would mean that Healer Alto probably died, and that would mean Malfoy might die protecting her. The one thing Harry was determined to do was never fail another partner. He gritted his teeth and fought harder, blurring his own mind with his spells, responding so fast and so instinctively that he didn't know half the names of those he cast.

_Even if he fails you? Even if he never comes? _

Harry shrugged a dismissive shoulder at those thoughts. They would only weaken him, and so he couldn't afford to entertain them. What mattered was fighting, and surviving, and taking the twisted with him if there was no other way to kill her. There were spells that would do that, and he was more practiced with those spells than most other wizards, because he had accepted the necessity of making them part of his arsenal long before he joined the Socrates Corps.

The woman abruptly flinched. Harry didn't know why, and he didn't dare glance over his shoulder just in case this was a trick and the stupidity killed him. He twisted to the side and cast a spell that required only a nonverbal incantation, he'd practiced so often on the dummies that the Aurors set up in their training rooms. _Lupus!_

The woman cried out as her throat opened, apparently torn by invisible teeth, and she spilled on the ground. The shadowy wolves danced forwards and crowded around her, their mouths open in mournful howls. Harry turned to face them, his wand lifted aggressively. He would destroy them, too, if he had to.

Instead, though, the wolves began to melt backwards, their heads lowered and their lips wrinkling back in what looked like defeated snarls. Harry watched them go, panting and shaking his head as he finally had a chance to clear the sweat from his eyes. He didn't know if that was supposed to happen, but then, he had never heard of a twisted being killed _before _her companions. The companions would sometimes wake up, if they were spellbound wizards, or they would vanish completely because they depended on the twisted for their existence. Larkin's ghosts had been like that.

These wolves…Harry didn't know. But as he stood there and watched, they faded, and the woman's body twitched and let out the last of its blood. So Harry reckoned that, after all, they had depended on her for their existence and he didn't have to worry about them anymore.

He sighed and bent over to pick up the twisted's wand. When possible, they were supposed to bring those back to the Auror Department, where the Unspeakables would take charge of them in their continuing effort to understand where the twisted came from and what produced them.

"Potter?"

Harry crouched and spun around, then sighed and shook his head. "Malfoy," he said. "Ten minutes too late. Where _were _you?" That was a stupid and unfair question, he thought a minute later, seeing the way Malfoy's face tightened up, but it was an honest one. He thought he could have taken the bloody twisted, whose name he still didn't know, minutes earlier or maybe even alive if he'd had his partner with him.

"I was busy making sure that she wasn't in hospital," Malfoy retorted, walking towards him. It looked as though his hair was ruffled from running, but not battle. Harry shrugged, trying to force away the aching resentment. Malfoy had killed the last twisted. It was Harry's turn for the hard work. "Her name is Holinshead, by the way. Healer Alto told me."

Harry blinked. There was something in Malfoy's voice when he said the Healer's name, something thick and tortured and catching…

_Good God, he's in love. Or in lust, maybe. _Harry was sure, if he asked, Malfoy would tell him with a condescending smile that members of his family didn't fall in love, and especially not with people who had a Gryffindor-like desire to save the public and might not even be pure-blood. Harry rolled his eyes. It wasn't worth arguing over.

"All right," Harry said. "That makes things easier." He stooped and picked up Holinshead's wand, trying to find a place where it wouldn't jab him. It had stopped being a sword when she died, but it was still longer and sharper than normal. "Why don't you stay and interview her, then, while I go back to the Ministry?"

Malfoy didn't say anything. Harry turned and found that he was staring intently at Harry, his eyebrows bent down as though he had tried to decide what he should do and only found himself stuck between options that he didn't like.

"What?" Harry snapped. He tried to clear his throat and clear the anger out with it, but it was hard. He had done what he was supposed to do, and he was doing what he was supposed to do now, offering Malfoy a chance with the woman who _could _be the love of his life, for all Harry knew. He knew what had happened to Daphne Greengrass, Malfoy's fiancée. This would be much better for him, if he could love someone who he seemed interested in and who was probably gentle, like most Healers.

Healer Tella crossed his mind, and he almost smiled.

_I did say _most _Healers._

"You think I'm useless," Malfoy said then, destroying the neat train of thoughts Harry was gathering. "You want to send me away because I didn't show up in time to help you with your stupid fight." His voice hissed and scratched. If the voice was an animal, Harry thought, rubbing at his eyes and yawning, it would be a cat stuffed in a box, and letting the whole world know how angry it was as a result.

"You're not useless, but you might be better off talking to the witness that you _protected _and getting the right information from her," Harry said. He was glad of the patience in his voice, although it only made Malfoy bristle more. If Malfoy tried to take this to Okazes or even higher, he would only sound stupid. Harry was offering him the chance to do something he wanted to do, and politely. It was Malfoy's idiotic fault if he didn't accept. "In the meantime, I'll go back and start on the report about Holinshead. I'm the one who fought her, so it should be my words that go in that part of the report. I don't need your help."

"Of course you don't," Malfoy said, and his voice was low and savage. "Who's ever needed my help but Kellen and Healer Alto? And one of them is dead, and the other disapproves of me."

Harry eyed Malfoy. That sounded like a strange juxtaposition to him, but then again, he was coming to accept more and more that Malfoy was…stranger than he had thought. "Fine," he said. "Then you can go back and do what's good and right, for someone who needs your help, and I'll go and start on the paperwork. That's going to help you, too, since it spares you from having to do as much of the work."

Malfoy's hand tightened on his wand. "I could have come here. I could have fought Holinshead, and I would have done it as well as you did."

Harry rolled his eyes. "I can't deny that, after the way you handled Larkin and Jerome," he said. "But you ought to know that you didn't, and that I'm trying to be _nice._ You like Alto. Go spend time with her."

Malfoy flinched as though Harry had reached out and stuck a hot iron on his hand. "I'm not…that's ridiculous. I don't like her."

"You can interpret the word in whatever way you _like_," Harry said, losing patience again. He turned his back and stumped into the distance, still juggling Holinshead's wand. He tried to cast a charm on it that would surround the sharp edges without dulling them and changing the wand, but he didn't manage; the edges parted the spell as though slicing through silk. Harry sighed in disgust and settled for walking with it by his side.

"I can do just as much as you can. You didn't have to kill her by yourself."

From the sound of it, Malfoy was standing behind him and watching him go. Harry gave him a rude gesture and continued walking. Idiot. So he _was _going to stay and talk to Healer Alto? Then why did he want to make it sound as though he wasn't?

A moment later, Harry shook his head. Who knew why Malfoy did anything?

* * *

Draco leaned back against the wall and shook his head. "Then I don't understand. If you acknowledge that Dark Arts have their place in the world, then I can understand your sympathy for a twisted like Jerome. But you were still angry that I killed him. Why?"

Alto shook her head back. She had larger eyes than Draco had realized, and longer hair. She also could be more relaxed than most Aurors when she had the door of her office locked and the better part of a bottle of Firewhisky in her. She giggled at Draco's question, swaying back and forth on her chair and staring off into the distance.

"Did you know," she whispered, "that I am a maze of contradictions? Sometimes, I surprise myself. I'm a Healer, but there are times I know that someone needs to die. I'm supposed to feel no sympathy for the Dark Arts, because I know they can drive people mad and cause the kind of wounds we can't always cure, but at the same time, I know that longing for power. I know that sometimes, you think of how much you could _do_ if you only had the right spell. Sometimes you know that that spell is one that the Ministry's banned, and other times, it's only that you _might _know a spell that could help you if only the Ministry hadn't banned so many studies, and destroyed so many books."

Draco smiled at her in fascination. He had heard the theory that the Ministry had destroyed and banned books of Dark Arts and powerful spells from many people, most notably his father. But it had always seemed more like a conspiracy theory than anything else to him. The Ministry's scare tactics when it came to the Dark Arts were far more effective than banning books would have been. With the number of private magical libraries in the world and the protective spells cast on valuable texts, the chances of them turning up again were too great to make the effort worthwhile.

Draco had lost gambles on many things, but he had never lost when gambling on the laziness and inefficiency of Ministry officials.

"All right, so you contradict yourself," he said. "But that doesn't mean that you have to scold me for killing someone who would have killed you. Someone who used Dark Arts for good reasons, maybe, but was driven mad by them."

Alto shook her head until her hair fell into her eyes. "You don't understand. The twisted…that's a name that the Ministry came up with, a category they invented when they realized they didn't know how else to name You-Know-Who. Those stories about them never being able to use Healing magic and always having symbols and companions are all based on You-Know-Who. I think they're just taking one symptom and naming it twisted and refusing to investigate the disease. They're telling you you can _kill_ them. No justice. No trial." She leaned forwards, and her eyes, Draco thought, were the same shade as his own, but far more beautiful. "Does that sound fair, Auror Malfoy?"

Draco swallowed. He thought about the way his parents had exiled him without listening to his side of the story, without even considering why he wanted to be an Auror rather than make his way in politics, and shook his head. "I—I reckon it doesn't."

Alto nodded. "So. I wanted to study the twisted and figure out some way to support them. We could have captured Jerome and tried to get him back to normal. The same with Holinshead." She bowed her head and closed her eyes. "You didn't tell me, but you didn't have to. Your partner killed her, didn't he?"

Draco cleared his throat. "Yes. He did."

"Without trying to find out why she did what she did," Alto whispered. "Without trying to find out what would heal her, what would cure her."

Draco opened his mouth to respond, but the Ministry's dry regulations, their rules for defining who was a twisted and who could do what concerning them, stuck in his throat. They had nothing against the living words Alto was showing him, the contradictions that made Draco who he was.

Because he was the same way. A pure-blood who still held many of the old beliefs but associated every day with Muggleborns, and protected them, and had a half-blood for a partner. A Malfoy who refused to do what his parents told him. A strong-willed man who had bowed his head to the Auror yoke.

They discussed a few other things after that, but Draco knew that no other word they exchanged was as important. He walked forth from hospital into the darkness, slow and thoughtful.

What if the word "twisted" really meant nothing at all, and was just an attempt to make new Dark Lords less terrifying, the way Alto had argued? Draco would have to think about his past and his future before he could decide.

He Apparated to the Ministry and found the office deserted. Potter's report was waiting, along with a snippy note about his lack of timeliness that Draco read only one line of before crumpling it up and throwing it away. He had other things to think about, things that included whether he would continue in Auror work at all.

There were alternatives.


	4. A Quarter of the Trust

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—A Quarter of the Trust_

"Good morning, Potter."

Harry kept his head down, and only grunted when Malfoy spoke to him. He realized that he was probably being childish, but, well, that was fine with him. This was the second time in as many days, practically, that Malfoy had left him with all the paperwork, because God forbid that he do anything but talk to Healer Alto.

_ But it's not like you need him, as a partner, to figure out what's going on. You could investigate Healer Alto's background by yourself, and you know you will. Malfoy's unlikely to help, as obsessed with her as he is._

Harry ground his teeth. Yes, he could do this by himself. He would _have _to do this by himself. But he wasn't supposed to have to. He was _supposed _to be able to rely on his partner, who should quit being a selfish berk and attend to the duties that he was supposed to have as an Auror of the Socrates Corps.

_There's no reason for you to think that it would be any better if he _was _paying attention. Remember how much he distrusted you during the Larkin case, and especially how much he distrusted your visions? He's probably still like that. You'd be better off if you went to your superiors and requested a new partner._

Harry shuddered and rejected that idea. The last thing he wanted was to make his superiors pay attention to him so soon after the disastrous Larkin case. No, he would keep on with his quiet, steady searching, and hope that he wouldn't have to face another twisted soon who would try to kill him before Malfoy could arrive.

Something slammed into the middle of his desk. Harry had a hand on his wand and was leaping away before he thought about it. His eyes narrowed on Malfoy, who had a large book of Irish wizarding laws in his hand and a death glare that Harry reluctantly had to admit more than matched his own best effort.

"Will you _listen _to me?" Malfoy demanded. "I have information about Healer Alto and the twisted who were attacking her that I'm sure you'll find valuable."

"This ought to be good," Harry said, sitting back down behind the desk but tilting his chair at an angle that he knew would annoy the prim and proper Malfoy. "Considering that I wrote down all the information we needed to construct a report yesterday, and you did nothing but talk and drink."

Malfoy started to snap, then blinked at him. "How do you know what I was doing with Healer Alto? Considering that you'd already left by the time I returned—"

"You weren't back at six-o'clock," Harry pointed out, with what he thought was a restrained amount of quiet anger. "I wasn't waiting around for you any longer. Have a nice conversation, whatever. I can smell the Firewhisky on you, by the way, which is how I knew what you were doing." He paused and pretended to consider something. "Although I reckon that I only thought you'd talked, while you might have been doing something else."

Malfoy's eyes fired, and he looked as if he might shoot spells at Harry over the desk. "Don't imply that," he hissed. "Healer Alto is a _lady_."

Harry raised one eyebrow. That hadn't been at all what he expected. Something about blood prejudice, something about how Malfoy was more delicate or had better sense than to sleep with a witness, sure. But calling Alto by a title Harry was most accustomed to hearing from Aunt Petunia when she talked about a female neighbor who didn't live up to her standards was unexpected.

"Right," he said a moment later, aware that he'd lost his momentum and he'd have to work harder to dent Malfoy's contempt now. "Anyway, you've been skiving off for the last few cases and I'm sick of it."

"Who killed Jerome?" Malfoy retorted, though a moment later he flushed. "Not that I should have done that."

Harry's chair thumped into the floor before he could stop himself. He wondered if Healer Alto had drugged Malfoy's Firewhisky. Surely such a thing was possible, given all the potions and ingredients she would have access to.

"Malfoy," he said a moment later, and he knew that his voice was absurdly soft, but he couldn't exactly help it. "Have you considered that you're acting oddly? Defending Healer Alto, doubting that you were right to kill a twisted who would have killed her and probably a lot of other people if we hadn't intervened—"

"We could have captured him," Malfoy interrupted.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Because that worked _so _well when you went after Larkin," he snapped. One of the few other Aurors in the Socrates Corps, Eric Latham, had died that day, afflicted by one of Latham's terrifying visions. "You idiot, we couldn't have captured him unless no one was in danger, and even if you think we were both strong enough to fight him and there was no danger to _us_, what about Healer Alto? You know, your 'lady' that he had a knife to?"

Malfoy blinked and turned away. "It was something she said that gave me the idea," he murmured in a distracted voice. "If we can use Dark Arts for purposes other than just killing, if we can use them in the pursuit of our jobs, then surely we can't tax the twisted for using them for their own purposes?"

"Yes," Harry said, when he could get his breath back from the sheer stupidity of that thought. _I can't believe I ever thought he was attractive. No one that dumb could possibly conceal it forever. _"I—Malfoy, there's a huge difference between using them for healing and protection, and using them to kill people. Not to mention that twisted are incapable of Healing people anyway."

"Jerome was a Healer before he went insane," Malfoy said stubbornly. "So was Holinshead. There's something there." He ran a hand through his hair. "It made more sense when she said it."

Harry shook his head. He would have been more worried about Malfoy, but apparently he was so infatuated that anything his idol said came across to him as genius. Possibly, too, given his behavior lately, he didn't like being part of the Socrates Corps. Not being able to make the true nature of his occupation public to other people probably irritated him.

Frankly, though, that wasn't Harry's bloody _problem_. "You've got two choices," he told Malfoy, picking up his quill. "Quit, or ask to be assigned a different partner. Because I'm not about to stay with one who doesn't do any of the work and wants me to slow down when a twisted is trying to kill me."

"I never asked that of you." Malfoy gave him a fiery look. "I would have helped with Holinshead yesterday. I killed Jerome."

"You _would _have helped," Harry said flatly. "Well, that's a great comfort to me, when she's trying to stick me with a sword and you're up there staring at Healer Alto's face and obsessing over the _smart_ things she says."

Malfoy drew his wand. Harry stared at him in silence, not impressed. For one thing, he already had his wand out; he'd had it half-drawn ever since Malfoy had slammed the book down. For another, Malfoy was an idiot if he thought Harry would hold still long enough for Malfoy to curse him.

"I told you not to make fun of her," Malfoy whispered. "She's my lady. The first human being who's tried to understand me since my parents cast me out. The first comfort I've had since Daphne went to prison. You couldn't be comforting if you tried."

Harry rolled his eyes again. "I can understand that. What I don't understand is you letting it interfere in your work. She's a witness and a victim. Talking to her the way you are, defending her, could mean you've compromised your professionalism."

"Because, of course," Malfoy said in a high, falsetto tone, "one must never talk to _witnesses!_ You must get everything you mean to gain from them by telepathy! Talking compromises the pure and trusting relationship between them and an Auror." He snapped his head around so that Harry, presumably, would get the full force of his sneer. "Come off it."

"This is an example of how childish she makes you act," Harry told him, deliberately turning so that his eyes were filled with paperwork instead of Malfoy. He actually thought he might hit him if he didn't look away, and that was unusual for him. His blood seemed to be racing more and more the more he thought about this, and the desire to stand up and walk out of the room was as nothing before his desire to strike. He didn't understand this. Even when he was fighting with Hale, who had been the one of his partners who understood him least, he hadn't wanted to _hurt_ her.

"She doesn't make me do anything," Malfoy said, with a strange, brittle little laugh. "She's perfectly capable of defending herself, too, but since she's not here, she can't hear the awful things that you're saying about her. I want to defend her because of what she's said to me, not because she makes me—she doesn't make me act childish."

Harry's emotions were fleeting, a good portion of the time, since Lionel died, and the intense desire to defend himself was gone now. Harry privately thought that he had more room for grief and quiet anger, not enough for irritation and fear and all the other, lesser ones. He looked back at Malfoy, who continued to stand in the center of the room, so sure he was right, so committed to defending his "lady"—and that was a fucking strange way for him to talk, too—that he couldn't look back on the last few days with the jaundiced eye Harry was casting over them.

"Fine," he said quietly. He was impressed with himself for the quietness. "There are a few more reports that need both our signatures. Then I'm going to go to Okazes and ask to be reassigned to a different partner."

Malfoy reeled back as though Harry had punched him the way he had thought about doing. "What?" he asked, his breath coming short. "Why?"

"Because you drew your wand on me just now," Harry said. "I could put up with the rest, the crazy obsession with a witness. I know your history, I know why that would happen. And I could put up with having to do a little of the heavier work when, as you say, you did kill Jerome. But not this. Not with a gesture of mistrust so fundamental that I don't have the words to describe it. You don't get to do that to me. No."

Malfoy blinked and cleared his throat, glancing down at his wand as though it had betrayed him and jumped into his hand of its own accord. "That wasn't—I didn't mean to do that," he said.

Harry sneered at him and turned around to continue writing. "Obviously. You didn't want me to know how deep your obsession ran, and you didn't want to scare me away. But it's happened. Congratulations."

"Potter, listen."

Harry did, although he didn't look up from the report, but Malfoy said nothing after that. He continued shifting in place, as though his mouth couldn't move without eye contact. Only when Harry signed his name and leaned back to give him a hard stare did Malfoy sigh in relief and begin speaking, quickly.

"I know this looks bad. I know it looks as though I'm spending too much time with Healer Alto and leaving you with all the work. But it really was just that she overwhelmed me by trying to understand me, and no one's done that in months."

Harry grunted, thinking of the time he and Malfoy had shared together at Latham's funeral. But if Malfoy wasn't going to talk about that or didn't remember it, then it would be stupid for Harry to bring it up. "Fine. Go on."

"She even offered to treat you, when I reminded her that they'd banned you from St. Mungo's." Malfoy took a step closer, then stopped. "That's generous. Considering the way Healers normally react to you, and that she's one of them, you can't say that that's not generous."

"Someone can be generous and still compromise an Auror's professionalism," Harry pointed out. "If you go to interview her again, then I want to come with you."

"Of course," Malfoy said, and gave Harry a smile that seemed to have a light shining behind it. When Harry looked back down at his desk this time, it was for a different reason. _Fuck, he's attractive. I wish he wasn't. _"Unless a twisted attacking at the time needs both of us to defeat it."

Harry nodded, and then waited. Malfoy seemed to think everything was settled, because he started back to his desk.

"No apology for drawing your wand on me, your own partner?" Harry called after him.

Malfoy turned around with a curled lip that was, Harry had to admit, impressive, unless one considered what sneers Harry had seen in the past, especially from such masters of the art as Snape. "I gave as much of an apology as I'm going to," he said. "I said I didn't mean to. Which is true. Nothing else would be."

Harry cracked a smile despite himself, and turned back to his paperwork. This time, Malfoy worked beside him uncomplainingly, and had the report on Alto's words finished before Harry had completed his next form to fill out. When he handed it to Harry, Harry skimmed it, but could see no trace of obsession. Malfoy had retreated back to "coolly professional," or at least it seemed like it.

He signed his name and tossed it to Malfoy. "Do you want to take that to Okazes? I'm going to get some lunch."

Malfoy opened his mouth as though to object that he was being sent about the dirty work, but then visibly paused and considered whether being sent to fetch lunch would be any better. Harry grinned at him, and Malfoy gave a small but visible smile back.

"Of course," he said, and unfolded from his chair like a striking snake, striding to the door. He added over his shoulder, "Bring me a cup of tea and a salad, if you can find any shop within reach of the Ministry that does a decent one."

Harry started to reply, but Malfoy was gone. He shrugged and set out into Diagon Alley, mentally running the places one could get food through his head and wondering which one would have the best salad. Up until this point, it had been a purely academic question for him. He got enough salad when he ate over at Ron and Hermione's house; he didn't need it when he was trying to keep from falling asleep over paperwork.

_Do you want to impress him? _

Harry cringed at the sound of the sharp hiss in the back of his head. "Not really," he muttered at it. "No. I just—I want to bring back something he'll like. Something to keep the peace between partners."

There were sneers and laughter in response to that, or there would have been if the voice was real. Then came silence. Harry shivered and walked faster, his head bowed and his eyes aimed straight ahead. He didn't know why an attempt to get along with his partner should make him feel so awful, but apparently, it did.

But he would much rather get along with Malfoy then not get along with him, so a cup of tea and a salad it was.

* * *

"Auror Malfoy! I am glad to see you."

Draco found himself turning before he consciously recognized the voice, but then he did, and his mouth filled with water. He shook his head, disgusted with himself, and walked towards Healer Alto with a gentle nod, feeling as if she was a deer whom he might scare off if he moved too suddenly.

"What are you doing here, my lady?" he asked. He noticed that she held herself as if she was cold, and her constant, darted glances at the walls of the Ministry corridor weren't giving the impression she wanted to be here, either.

"I wanted to apologize, of course!" She smiled up at him, and Draco's breath came short as he realized he had forgotten how bright her eyes were. "We had such an interesting conversation the other day, one that revealed to me the depths of my own prejudices."

"It did?" Draco arched an eyebrow. He could remember things changing for _him_ that day, but he didn't think he'd argued particularly eloquently for an opposite side from the one that Healer Alto had championed. He couldn't remember arguing at all. He thought he had mostly sat there and raised points for the pleasure of hearing her talk, while he drank in her beauty.

Healer Alto laughed at him and shook her hair back, so that it foamed and danced down her back in long, loose curls. He didn't remember seeing it like that the last time he had seen her, either.

_Only yesterday._

But it seemed farther away than that.

"You underrate your own persuasiveness," Alto was saying, with such fervor Draco was almost sure he did. "You are an excellent reminder to me that I have some prejudice against Aurors and—others—who kill for a living. I might think of myself as a soldier in the war against death, but does that give me the ability to despise someone else who is fighting the same enemy in a different way? Or even a different war in a different way? We're both soldiers. I can't get angry with you for destroying the twisted when I destroy disease and sometimes the work of people who were only trying to survive."

Draco glanced around quickly, and then pulled her towards a room which he knew the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had set aside for victims of Dark wizards to rest in. He didn't know whether anyone would actually be interested in what Alto was saying, but he didn't think mentioning the twisted in the open was a good idea.

_At least you have that much sense, _hissed a voice in the back of his mind, a voice that certainly _sounded _like Potter.

Draco shook his head. He had to stop thinking about things like that. Next thing he would be talking to Potter as though they were friends, and he didn't want that. It would be better if he was mooning over Healer Alto.

That thought stung him into straightening up and turning around to speak to her in a cooler tone, as was appropriate for someone he didn't really know. "I didn't mean to make you change your mind," he said. "I understand what you said. It may be possible to capture the twisted, to study them, and that means that we wouldn't have to kill them."

She stared at him, her mouth wide, and a harsh emotion twisted Draco's chest. He wanted her to approve, he wanted her to be proud of him. He swallowed. It felt less now like he was looking for a substitute for Daphne. Perhaps he was looking for someone who could replace his mother, instead?

But when he looked at her bright grey eyes and the way she held out a finely-shaped hand to him, the response he felt was not at all son-like.

"I didn't mean to make you condemn yourself," Alto said, and her voice was as low and glorious as a wind sweeping through a field of starflowers. "If that happened—oh, I _knew _I should have been more careful about how I spoke to you!" She dropped her hand and backed away, looking upset. "It's one thing to decide on your own that you'd rather study the twisted, the way I dream of doing, and another thing to blame yourself because of what you've done with the noble motive of freeing others from a threat."

Draco shook his head, throat clogged with words that he couldn't voice, for once. It was the way he had felt when he stood with his parents' last letter in his hands and read what they demanded. It was the way he sometimes felt around Potter since they had become partners, though, thank Merlin, not very often.

"Listen," he said at last. "You did make me rethink some of what I do, but I _value _that. What I did would mean nothing if I did it mindlessly. I was promoted into the Socrates Corps because of—things I did and saw, but what if what's most important is how I think? I shouldn't shut down my brain just because I would like to go about my duties untroubled."

Healer Alto watched him with emotions flickering and dancing behind her eyes like restless lightning for some moments. At last, she nodded. Draco felt something that was tense snap in his chest, back to calmness, as he watched that. That he be able to convince her and spend time with her was almost more important than protecting her.

_Almost. _Because when he heard the howl behind him, he whirled around and lifted his wand without a second thought, although they were in the Ministry and the most logical explanation would have been that it was a howl of laughter at catching Draco Malfoy and a pretty woman alone.

But the man who shut the door of the holding room behind him and began to move towards them was not someone who belonged in the Ministry. The tattered robes he wore were still Healer's green; the flickering foxes that paced alongside him, made of light and fire only, casting no shadows, were creatures Draco had never seen before. The man lifted his hand to his forehead, shading his brilliant blue eyes and squinting at them as though his sight was weak. On the back of his hand, Draco saw, his chest winding up tighter than ever before, was the tattoo of a cage.

And the stink of Dark magic around him made the Mark on Draco's arm, which warned him when he encountered particularly powerful spells such as this one, tingle and ache to the point of burning.

"Another one?" Draco asked, but his voice was hollow and he didn't know who he was asking. The soft moan Healer Alto gave behind him meant that she probably couldn't answer.

The man smiled, and gestured to one of the foxes. The fox spoke in a perfectly normal human voice. Draco noticed the man's lips were moving along, mouthing the words, but he was apparently unable to say them for himself. "I am the last one you will ever need to face. Do not fear."

"Your name?" Draco asked, stepping to the side so he could absolutely sure his body was between the man and Healer Alto. The air in the room felt stiffer, as though it was becoming water. That still didn't prepare him for it when a silver cage suddenly shimmered and formed around him, any more than the howl of laughter had prepared him to see a twisted facing him.

Draco lunged at the bars of the cage immediately. For a moment, they parted as if he would be too strong for them, and then snapped back into place. This time, when he pounded on them, the bars refused to part.

The man stared at him with his mouth open. Then he shook his head and the fox said, "Interesting. Well. I intervened just in time." He turned to face Healer Alto, drawing his wand as he did. Another cage appeared around her, holding her in place. She lifted her chin, eyes bright and vulnerable and fearless.

_The cage is his flaw, _Draco thought frantically, and began casting at the bars again. They absorbed the heat and cold of his first few furious spells without changing, while the man moved steadily and slowly towards Healer Alto, murmuring words at her through the mouth of his fox that Draco was too occupied to hear.

_That doesn't help. I can't stop him—_

_ Potter! Get your arse back here!_


	5. A Fifth of the Attention

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—A Fifth of the Attention_

Harry set down Malfoy's lunch carefully on his desk and then glanced around with a sigh and a shake of his head. So, Harry went all the way to Diagon Alley to get lunch for the berk, and of _course _he couldn't be here when Harry got back, because that would be too polite.

"Malfoy?" he called down the corridor, slamming the door of the Socrates Office back against the wall and ignoring the muffled sounds that came through the doors of the other offices in consequence. Everyone knew that Socrates Aurors were some of the most dangerous and had the most privileges. No one would dare complain to his face. "Are you lurking out here talking to Healer Alto again?"

No one answered him, but Harry had to pause and frown as he thought about that. If Malfoy had gone off to spend time with her again, then his tea was going to get cold, and Harry didn't want to listen to the sniping that would inevitably follow. He wanted to find him. He drew his wand.

"_Point Me _Draco Malfoy," he said clearly, and watched as the wand spun around in his hand and then stopped, quivering, pointing towards the far end of the corridor. Harry shook his head and set off. He would probably find Malfoy chattering comfortably away with one of his friends in another Corps—it sounded as though he'd been better at making, and keeping, friends than Harry had—and he would stare at Harry in awful wonder when he came up, demanding to know why—

Then the muscles in Harry's gut tightened, and he thought he heard Malfoy's voice in his ear, thin and distant.

_No. I don't think that's what he's doing. Not at all. It can't be._

Harry didn't know why it "couldn't" be, but he found that he was speeding up, his breath coming faster as he bounded down the corridor, his feet striking the floor with unusual speed that he still didn't know was going to be enough.

* * *

The man had come to a step instead of murdering Miranda right away. Draco reckoned that was a good thing, but it still didn't tell him how to get out of this cage. He drummed with one frantic hand on the bars, enough that one of the flame-foxes alongside the man turned its head and snarled at him.

The man didn't pay attention, though. Draco could see the shine of his blue eyes from the side, they were that bright. He looked at Miranda as though he wanted to sear his gaze into her, and then he nodded and said, "You think that you can get away with this? I don't know why. You are a rival, yes, but I didn't think a rival would spring from _this _direction." He paused, then added, "Unless you think you can rescue them from my domination. That would make sense. It would also mean that you don't understand the nature of my flaw."

_He's a twisted, _Draco thought, and then wondered why that had felt like a shattering revelation. Of course he bloody was, what with the foxes as companions and the flaw and the Dark magic—and the apparent desire to murder a woman who had never done him harm.

But it sounded, now that he thought about it, as though this was not just a twisted, but a combination of them. A twisted taking over another twisted? Because it made no sense for him to speak as though his flaw was less visible than his ability to wandlessly trap people in cages. Draco shook his head.

Miranda looked at the man with those shimmering grey eyes, and said, "Hello, Lewin. I'm sorry to see that we've lost you to the Dark Arts, too."

The man sighed, and Draco thought he could feel the heat of his breath from here. "You were always going to lose him. Because I found him."

_A twisted who preys on Healers? _That was what it sounded like. Draco wondered if the same man had seized control of Jerome and Holinshead. He didn't remember the same blue eyes on Jerome, though.

_And I don't know if they were on Holinshead, because Potter killed her before I could get there._

The thought melted away as Miranda said, "I will not let you hurt him," and Draco suddenly realized how stupid he was, to just _stand _there while someone threatened the woman he was in love with. He screamed and flung himself against the bars of the cage, battering, scratching, trying to tear it down.

Once again, Lewin, if that was the man's name, didn't seem inclined to look at him. He was examining Miranda instead, and she stood there and let him, defiant as always, not inclined to look aside. Why should she? She was the beautiful one, she was the true one, and she was the one who would die if Draco didn't find some way to get out of this _stupid _cage—

And then the door burst open and Potter was there, charging in like the conquering hero that he probably thought he was, and everything changed.

Two of the fire-foxes with the twisted sprang up into the air and came down facing Potter. The rest turned around and snarled, but didn't move closer, and Lewin never looked at all. Perhaps he thought he wouldn't need more than a few of his companions to handle someone like Potter.

Draco could have warned him better, but he stood there instead, his lips pulling back from his teeth as he smiled, and didn't feel like warning the idiot. Why should he? He had tried to threaten Miranda.

Potter crouched and moved his wand in a quick swing that took it near the fire-foxes. The nearest ones snapped, their teeth darting out like flames, but Potter's wand was away and gone, and what was left instead, hanging above their heads, was a rope of water. It dropped around their necks and tugged them towards each other, making them scramble and keen and yelp. Draco laughed aloud as he listened to them suffering.

They could die for all he cared. The only one in the room that he cared about surviving was Miranda.

Well. And it might be nice if Potter could live, too, Draco conceded. He might be able to figure out some way to remove them from these cages.

The fire-foxes disappeared, and another pair turned around. At the same moment, Lewin lifted his wand to kill Miranda. She ducked her head and then looked up with such defiance, such _quiet _courage, that Draco dropped his wand and kicked at the bars in a frenzy. There had to be some way out of here, he had to make Lewin pay, he was going to do it, he was going to make sure the bastard could never hurt anyone again—

Or so he thought, because Potter had already sprung up and somersaulted over the foxes, coming down lightly between Lewin and Miranda.

Lewin's curse reflected back from a mirror-like Shield Charm that Potter had conjured from nowhere, and he snarled and tried to create a cage, but Potter had already darted too close to him for that, carrying the battle to him, and the cage jumped into being, collided with the cage Miranda stood in, and collapsed into nothingness. Draco smiled. So the cages could destroy each other. He started to nudge and kick and move, as much as he could, his cage across the floor in the direction of Miranda's.

Potter and Lewin were pressed so close together that Draco thought for a moment someone peering through the doors would mistake them for lovers, entwined and kicking and hissing and spitting. Another irrelevant thought, and he scraped it off. He was closer to Miranda than he had been a moment ago, which only proved that the cages could be moved. He was going to reach her, and rescue her, and then they would run.

_What about Potter?_

_ Potter can handle himself—_

That was right when Potter screamed.

Draco turned around in spite of himself, which he attributed to that Auror training which ran so deep that, it said, the only acceptable response to a partner's scream was to react as though _you_ were the one being hurt. Otherwise, he wouldn't have turned his eyes from Miranda. He didn't know if he was _capable _of turning his eyes from Miranda, not anymore.

Potter was backing away from Lewin, his head ducked and his hand raised to an ugly brand on his right cheek. His eyes were flaring, but Draco saw fear and pain in them as well as rage. Lewin, whose expression he couldn't see from the way the man was standing, raised his wand and shook his head.

"You should not have challenged me," he said. "You could have lived if you had known when to back off."

Potter stared at his face, and that statement only seemed to madden him further, although Draco didn't know why. He swept his wand down and bellowed something so outraged and deep that Draco couldn't make out any of the words in it. Sparks leaped from his wand and spat at Lewin, who laughed, leaning back and gesturing negligently as though he could make them fly away and vanish.

Not that the sparks really mattered, Draco thought wisely. They were the kind of trick that children used when they first got their wands, one of the manifestations of accidental magic. It didn't mean Potter was going to—

The sparks caught on Lewin's hair and face, and then some of them fell on his flame-foxes.

And they all screamed, as one.

Potter was panting, his expression a rictus of triumph. He was staring at something on the ground, or just above the floor, something that hovered between the flame-foxes. Draco craned his neck, trying to see, although he could feel the pressure like a hand on the back of his nape that urged him to look at Miranda.

The air had changed between Lewin and his companions, thickening so Draco could make out the faint outlines of bonds. As he watched, more fire spread and sketched more bonds, binding Lewin to all the foxes and all the foxes to each other. When fire touched one, it spread to the others. They all writhed and cried out in identical voices, and they all burned to death.

Potter leaned towards Lewin and smiled into his face. That close, Draco thought _he _had to worry about catching on fire, too, but he didn't. Perhaps he was immune to his own magic, or—more likely—he had used a spell that would affect Lewin but not anyone else.

"You thought you were clever," he said quietly. "You aren't. When you come back again, I'll be waiting for you."

Draco felt his eyes narrow. What did Potter know about twisted who could possess other twisted? And why hadn't he told Draco?

Lewin opened his mouth as though he would roar back, but the only thing that emerged from inside it was fire, like a dragon breathing out. He whimpered and collapsed into a pile of ashes, drifting down and around each other. Potter watched this with concentrated attention for a moment, and then kicked the ashes. They whirled into the air, and more fire from Potter's wand caught and separated them. They were gone in seconds. Potter whipped around and moved his wand through the motions of a complicated banishing spell, and the cages followed their master into oblivion.

Miranda fell. Draco sprang forwards and caught her, cradling her close. Miranda smiled at him, her eyes wide and her face sheened with the sweat of delirium.

"I thought," she whispered, "I thought I might be able to hold myself there, strong and brave, enough to die well. But I can't now." She closed her eyes, and her head drooped against Draco's chest.

Draco turned around, half-stumbling, already thinking about ways to get her to St. Mungo's so she would be all right. They couldn't refuse to treat _her_, she was one of them, if he could only find a way—

"Malfoy?"

Potter was advancing towards him, holding one hand out as if he would take Miranda from Draco, and he was _in the way_. Draco snarled at him hard enough that Potter stepped back, staring at him, and then Draco burst past his shoulder and began to run down the corridors of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement towards the nearest exit. He had to stop on the way to cast a Lightening Charm, though. Miranda wasn't heavy, but her weight dragged at him, and he didn't want to lose a moment that might save her life.

He cursed the necessity when he heard Potter catch up with him again. Potter trotted beside him as if he'd never heard of being tired, and when Draco tossed his hair out of his eyes and glared at him, Potter did nothing but smile pleasantly.

"Did you need help?"

"I'm taking her to hospital," Draco snarled back at him, "a place where _you_ can't follow. Not that you were there when I needed you, anyway."

Potter came to a stop, and his face drained of so much color his eyes looked black, instead of green. Draco turned away and went on running. He could remember a time, perhaps even a day ago, when he would have felt curiosity about what he had said to make Potter react that way.

But not now. Not when life would drain of color if she died.

* * *

"You realize that this could have been a public relations disaster for the Ministry, that someone could have seen you killing this former Healer and been seriously upset?"

Harry shrugged wearily and rubbed at the bandaged cut on his arm. He sat in front of Julian Okazes, as usual, the Head Auror's second-in-command, and the one who was told off to tell him off. Okazes sighed and swiped a hand across his eyes. Harry peeked at them from under his fringe, but, so far, the eyes facing him didn't shine with that lightning-colored radiance.

_ Good._ Because after fighting two foes that that had happened to, Harry wasn't going to hold back from cursing Okazes if he saw it again.

"And now you want another partner." Okazes sighed again and went through some of the papers on his desk. "You realize we would have a hard time finding someone else to work with you, given Vane's death on your watch and the tales that Hale is still spreading?"

Harry carefully didn't speak for a moment, so he wouldn't curse Hale's name in a way even the laid-back Okazes couldn't ignore. "I know, sir," he said. "But you could always do what I've been urging you to do for years."

Okazes gave him a look so flat Harry could picture sliding across it. "Not this nonsense again," he said, quietly but forcefully. "Aurors don't work unpartnered, Auror Potter. You ought to know that, as many times as you've asked and I've quoted the regulations to you."

"Not in other Corps," Harry said. "But in Socrates Corps, Auror Eric Latham, who died recently, worked without a partner."

"He was in between them," Okazes said, grinding his teeth. "A suitable one was being sought for him."

"But he still went into the field without one."

"And died for it."

"I'm not Latham," Harry said, leaning forwards on the edge of the seat. "Do you think I would die as easily as he did? And if I did, can you pretend the Ministry would be sad about losing someone who is, as you say, a public relations disaster for them?"

Okazes flinched, but Harry could see the idea taking root in the back of his eyes. If someone found a solution to the Potter problem once and for all, that person would be lauded, rewarded, perhaps even considered for a shot at the Head Auror position once the current one retired or died…

He would have solved a problem no one else could solve. And he would have praise and a reward waiting for him when he wanted it.

It didn't take him long to make up his mind. He nodded and slid a thick, creamy parchment across the desk to Harry. Harry's hand trembled as he picked it up, and he scowled, hoping he hadn't showed that to Okazes. But this was the form he had been trying to get hold of for two years, since Ron left. Even with Lionel, he had tried, because it would have been better for him to leave once he realized what he thought of Lionel and what Lionel thought of him. Sign this, and he would agree to work without a partner.

_And if you get injured, then what happens, since St. Mungo's won't treat you?_

Harry shrugged the thought away. So St. Mungo's wouldn't treat him. It wasn't the end of the world. What _really _mattered was that he would have what he wanted—the freedom and the _quiet _to pursue his career the way it should be. Perhaps he could find someone in another Corps to work with, someone who had demonstrated the kind of ruthlessness necessary to working with the Socrates group.

And perhaps he would simply endure the rest of his Auror path alone. He didn't think it would last very long.

"Mind that you get Malfoy to sign it, too."

Harry blinked and looked up. Then he flushed, wondering how long Okazes had been sitting there and watching him caress the parchment as if it was his lover.

"Yes, sir," he said, bowing his head to Okazes before he turned and left the office, the spring that had been missing for a long time back in his stride.

* * *

"I need you to sign this."

Draco started and looked up. The Healers had let him stay in hospital with Miranda, but he hadn't expected an intrusion before morning. They seemed to understand the sacred nature of his grief, and wouldn't come in. He turned around, glaring, wondering why a Healer would think a form to be filled out more important than Miranda's suffering.

It was Potter, swirling into sight out from behind an Invisibility Cloak. Draco remembered the bloody thing from Hogwarts, but he hadn't thought he would be forced to see it again. He stood up, controlling his angry shaking with an effort. "What do you think you're _doing_?" he hissed under his breath. "The Healers banned you!"

"Fat lot of good that did them," Potter said, so unimpressed that Draco just stared at him. Potter held out a piece of parchment that must be the form he was talking about, and Draco reached impatiently for it. He would sign anything, as long as Potter would go away and leave him alone.

Anything, except the words that he saw at the top of the page. Draco stared, then leveled another glare at Potter.

"Why in the world would you demand to be assigned another partner?" he whispered. A moan and a movement from Miranda in the bed reminded him that he had more than just his own tender sensibilities to care for here, and he winced and moved away from her, shutting the door of her room behind him with a steady thump. "Well?" he hissed at Potter.

Potter looked at him without expression for a long moment. Draco pushed his hair out of his eyes and frowned at Potter. He didn't know why he would stand still like that and act as though _he _was the one who had it hard when Draco had been sitting for hours beside Miranda's bed, trying to figure out whether she had been damaged or not. The Healers thought not, they assigned her inability to wake up to shock, but Draco knew better. She had been fine until Lewin died.

"No one's replacing you," Potter said at last. "I just prefer to work alone, and not with a partner who neglects my safety and his own because he's infatuated with a witness."

Draco ground his teeth. "I would have killed Lewin if I could," he said. "That bloody cage imprisoned me, but—"

"It's not that," Potter said, and thrust his arm in front of him. Draco blinked at the long, bandaged cut that ran down it. "Do you remember seeing me receive this?" Potter asked. "Or the blood on the floor?"

"No," Draco said at last. "I was under the impression that his spells didn't hurt you badly."

Potter snorted. "Because you were occupied with _her_. I would have asked for your help, but you were already gone. And then when I went after you…what you said…" His face looked, for a moment, as pale as it had been when Draco had uttered those words about not needing him. Then Potter swallowed and soldiered on. "Well, you're right. You've had to face one twisted by yourself now, and you didn't make it to the battle with the one before that. We don't work well together as partners. We can save each other's lives a few times, maybe, and listen to each other's dark pasts, but it's not the same thing."

Draco shook his head. "I didn't mean I wanted to stop being partners with you, you berk." He heard a moan from Miranda's room, and cast an anxious glance over his shoulder. He tried to turn to Potter, but his attention was distracted, and he knew he wouldn't make his arguments as well as he should have. "I meant—I meant you were in the way, and I didn't want to deal with you right then."

Potter shrugged and gestured with the form he'd held out for Draco to sign. "And now you won't have to deal with me again."

"Listen," Draco said, and snatched up the form and crumpled it. Potter caught it in midair with a murmured spell, and then used a second to smooth it out again. Draco shook his head impatiently. "I can—I can ensure that this won't happen again. It's an extraordinary case. I think I'm in love, and I won't be in love with all our witnesses on all our cases."

Potter stared at him. Then he shook his head. "In love with someone after you've seen her three times? Draco, what—"

"If you're about to say it's unnatural," Draco said softly, his hand going to his wand, "to say it's blamable, or to say it must have something to do with her that's wrong, I would advise you to think very strongly about your words, instead. And to find different ones."

"No," Potter said. "But I do think it's not like you, and I do think we should talk about this." He reached out as if he would take Draco's arm.

Draco avoided him, maddened by the thought that Potter might take him from Miranda, and struck before he thought about it.

Potter stared at the blood spreading up his other arm, in a cut identical to the bandaged one. Then he looked at Draco without expression, nodded, and pulled the Cloak up until only his head projected outside it.

"You're going to wish that you'd signed the form," he said. "Because I don't deal with people who injure me on purpose, and I don't deal with people who scream at me about the rules but can't be arsed to obey them themselves. Signing the form would have been easier." And he turned away and left.

Draco closed his eyes. He tried to control his breathing and the whirling in his head, and couldn't.

Didn't Potter understand that this being different from the way he normally acted was part of the _point_? He'd never felt about someone the way he felt about Miranda. Even his affection for Daphne had been planned, not spontaneous. He was finally getting over her imprisonment, and now Potter wanted to imply that it was Miranda's fault—

She cried out. Draco immediately turned towards her room, thoughts of Potter drifting away from him like snowflakes.


	6. And Half a Dozen of the Other

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—And Half a Dozen of the Other_

The way Harry saw it, things had worked out like this:

Malfoy had refused to sign the parchment Okazes had given him. That meant, technically, they were still partnered. And if Harry tried to take the parchment back to Okazes's office without Malfoy's signature, or to forge it, he would have to face questions he couldn't answer.

On the other hand, if he simply laid the parchment aside for the point when Malfoy would emerge from hospital and continued working as if he had the right to continue alone, then no one should question him. Okazes was too relieved to have got rid of him, and Warren and Jenkins, the other two Aurors in the Socrates Corps, were involved in tracking a Dark wizard whom unreliable reports called a twisted. Harry would move slowly at first, tackling paperwork, until he found a case that he could take alone.

And then he could _be _alone, as he always should have been.

_No. The way I should have been is with Ron beside me, or Lionel, never learning the truth._

Harry grimaced and took another sip of the lukewarm tea in front of him, hoping it would help keep him awake. He was revising the files that St. Mungo's had kept on Jerome, Holinshead, and Lewin, all the twisted they'd killed so far in the last week. He didn't forge Malfoy's signature on important Ministry parchments, but there was no one around to keep him from doing it on requests to the Healers. They wouldn't respond to anything with Harry Potter written on it, therefore making them the opposite of most people in the wizarding world, but Malfoy was the hero of the hour for many of them, since he had saved a fellow Healer's life.

Harry wanted to know exactly how long these Healers had worked in hospital, when they had quit, and whether they had expressed jealousy or dislike of Healer Alto before attacking her. All of them were facts he _should _have learned long since, but they had learned who Jerome's victim was only after his death, and the others had simply come too quickly for Harry to even write separate reports on them, never mind investigating their backgrounds.

And Harry was looking for another thing, too. He wanted to know if any of them had ever been seen with bright blue eyes.

The memory of those eyes clawed at him. They were the one thing he had not told Malfoy about and thought he should have. Something—some enemy, at least—haunted the minds of those twisted, and even the minds of other Ministry officials. For some equally mysterious reason, that enemy wanted Healer Alto dead.

It made little sense. Harry would learn what there was to be learned, though, and it was possible that that enemy might have left traces of his presence in the files of people he hadn't thought to kill until later.

The files offered less help than Harry had hoped, at least on the surface. Jerome had been a talented young Healer who specialized in helping patients recover from ailments of the lungs. Then he had been discovered using a Dark spell that forced the dying to breathe while he experimented with potions designed to keep them living, a variation on necromantic magic, and sacked.

Harry shook his head when he read that. _You'd think the Healers would be bang alongside the idea of trying to keep their patients alive by whatever means necessary, considering that they wanted to chain me up in the Janus Thickey ward so I couldn't commit suicide._

Then he sighed. Perhaps that wasn't fair. But he found it hard to be fair to the Healers, who had been so much less than fair to him.

He read on. Jerome had worked with Healer Alto at several points, including when he did research on the spells that were later found to include the Dark ones, but had never expressed jealousy and dislike of her. That didn't happen until he started ranting about her after he was sacked. Did he blame her for that? The reports were incomplete, and it was unclear whether she had been part of the team who had decided to sack him, either.

Harry sighed and turned to the next file. Holinshead had worked with wounds for the most part, especially wounds created by knives and swords. Harry remembered her wand, turned into a needle-like sword, and scowled. He had put the bloody thing away in the Ministry Archives, where it showed no sign of changing back into a wand, and let the Unspeakables have at it. So far, they hadn't been able to make it change, either.

Holinshead had cooperated with Alto to teach mediwizards about the danger of leaving wounds untreated. She had come out of it with a coldness in her eyes so complete some of her friends had tried to talk to her. She'd killed one of them and vanished. The Healers had declared that she was sacked, of course, and the Aurors—a different Corps, Lucretius—got the order to hunt for her. But at the time, there were no indications she was a twisted. No mention of blue eyes, either.

Or of their companions, Harry couldn't help noting. Not Jerome's shadow-hounds, or Holinshead's wolves, or Lewin's fire-foxes…

Though, now that he thought about it, one specific similarity was that they were all dog-like.

Frowning, he scratched a note down about that and went on reading.

Lewin was the strangest case. He had been Alto's friend, perhaps her lover—the file skirted any mention of such things—for years. Then he had disagreed with her over whether more Blood-Replenishing Potions or more Boil Cure Potions should be ordered from the Potions masters that St. Mungo's regularly worked with. Such a strange thing to disagree about, at least in Harry's opinion, but what did he know about heated debates among Healers? Perhaps they spent their evenings flinging cutlery at each other over how many hairs were supposed to grow in a typical human nose, and whether you could pluck them or not.

But Lewin had left hospital, and burned most of his papers when he did so, so the Healers were unsure what experimental potions or notes he might have taken with him. Perhaps that was the source of his affinity to fire, Harry thought, scrawling notes with his free hand while he flipped through the pages of the file with the other.

Not much more than that, though. There was a picture of Lewin and Alto leaning against each other, their mouths open in what looked like laughter, moments before one of them playfully shoved the other. Then the photograph cycled back around to the two of them standing together again.

_I wonder if Malfoy knows about this, and what he would think if he did? _

Then Harry shook his head. Malfoy had chosen his allegiance. Harry didn't put up with partners who deliberately wounded him, or those who thought he was stupid and easy to trick. That meant he didn't put up with Malfoy. He wondered idly if the fool would think he was welcome back, and how soon he would try.

_You don't care, remember? You don't care if Malfoy's attractive, because you don't have the right to think about him that way. You don't care if he has a crush on Alto or it's just a spell, because he chose her, and you could never have him even if he was bent, since that worked out so well _last _time. You don't care what the hell he does, since he hates you._

He only had to glance at the wound on his arm, the second one, to know that.

But…

The possibility remained, nagging, in the back of his mind. If Alto had cast spells on all the others, spells no one could detect, might she have done the same to Draco? Perhaps she was a twisted herself—

And there Harry's mind stopped, because Alto was a Healer, and someone would have noticed by now if she couldn't use Healing magic. All of the others had apparently become twisted only _after _their departure from hospital. Not to mention that Draco didn't fit her choice of victim, if she had one. An Auror rather than a Healer, and someone who hadn't spent much time with her. The shortest period of association with her that Harry could find was six months, for Holinshead. All the others had spent far more time with her.

He sighed and closed the files. There were a few test spells he could cast on Malfoy, if the bloody bastard ever left his lady-love. For now, he was going home and making sure his wounds were properly treated. Since Malfoy couldn't look out for him and other partners were out of the question, Harry would just have to take care of himself.

* * *

"He was mine, you know."

Draco leaned down and kissed Miranda's hands as she opened and closed them helplessly. "Sssh," he whispered. "Try not to talk. I know this is hard for you, but it'll be easier if you don't talk."

She shook her head at him, eyes wide and wet and miserable. "No. You don't understand. He was my—my boyfriend. Calling him that sounds so ridiculous, but it's the truth." She closed her eyes. "Lewin. My Daniel. And now he's dead."

Draco swallowed. He wondered why his throat was so cold, his thoughts so sluggish. Was he jealous?

_Impossible. I won't be jealous of someone like Lewin, who went insane in the end and tried to kill Miranda. She might want me to be, but—I can't. It's like asking me to be jealous of Potter because he gets less than tender attentions from the Healers._

_Besides. _Draco held her hand and let his fingers play over the tender bones in the back of it. _If she feels sadness over the loss of a former lover, that's only right and proper, and shows her gentle heart. I would hope she would mourn for me in the same way if I died._

"My lady," he whispered. "Do you want some water? Something to eat?" Miranda had emerged from a coma after twelve hours in it, and the Healers, yielding to Draco's evident desire to stay, had advised him that she would need nourishment. It was her custom to eat a light meal early in the morning and then nothing after it. "Perhaps just some water?" he added, when he saw her face puckering up.

"No." Miranda caught his hand. "I want to talk about Daniel. Will you let me?" She smiled tiredly at him. "You're a true friend, Draco."

The bliss of having her speak his name was sheer delight, like swallowing a mouthful of cheesecake. Draco kissed the backs of her hands again in answer. "Of course, my lady," he murmured.

He sat back and listened as she rambled through memories of Lewin: the potions they had worked on together, the way they had sat day after day in her office drinking Firewhisky and conversing—

_Like us. But I'm alive now, and here, and he's dead._

—and working together and trying their hardest to smooth over the little disagreements that opened up between them, but nothing worked, until they had utterly lost it with each other in a stupid fight over potions. Miranda laughed through her tears as she recalled that, shaking her head, but they were still tears, and Draco murmured to her soothingly as she turned her hands back and forth in his grip, restless, unable to be comforted.

"I never thought that the last time I saw him before he died, I'd be screaming at him about Boil Cure Potions being a better investment," she whispered, and then she gave way at last to tears.

Draco held her, cradling her against him, feeling her slim form shake. She was nothing like Daphne, who had pretended to sophistication but never gentleness, Draco thought. She was tender and soft and loving. She had even offered to treat Potter, not something most Healers would have done.

_Potter._

The memory of the parchment he had brought to Draco, the _suddenness _with which he had arrived, made Draco shake his head a little as he thought about it. It seemed so distant, not part of the same world where he could listen to Miranda whispering his name with reverence and reaching up to touch his cheek with one finger.

"Draco? What are you thinking of?"

Draco thought that was only the second time she had used his name instead of his surname, although he wasn't sure. He caught her hands again, but this time didn't kiss them; he needed his lips to answer her question. "Of many things, my lady," he said. "But mostly of my partner, who was apparently so angry about the way I broke from him that he had to come to me and get me to sign a paper stating that I would no longer be his partner."

Miranda took a long breath which seemed to rattle her lungs. "But you didn't sign it?"

"Of course not!" Draco said, and massaged her fingers for a moment. "What do you take me for? I don't think what I've done in defense of you is so awful that I deserve to be punished for it. It's true I wasn't of much use the last few times that Potter battled a twisted, but I was with you, defending you."

Miranda gave him a faint smile, and Draco flushed. She was probably thinking that he couldn't do much _defending _of her last time, not when he was locked up in a cage and watching helplessly as Lewin advanced on her.

"I do hope you won't let him chase you out of Auror work," she said, "not if that's what you truly want to do. Of course you may change your mind at any time, and I would support you if you made the decision to do that. But I don't want your partner's fears to chase you away."

Draco snorted and shook his head. "He _wishes _he could chase me away! I would make it hard for him even if he wanted that."

"You think he doesn't?" Miranda cocked her head at him like a curious falcon. Her hands were gripping his now, and releasing, in a regular pattern, as though she thought that was the best way to learn the texture of his skin. Draco took a deep breath each time he felt the pressure lessen, but when it returned, he bowed his head in gratitude.

"No," Draco said. "I think he hopes I'll go to another Corps in the Aurors, and not trouble him any longer." He sneered. "Probably worried about ruining that perfect record with the Ministry that means so much to him."

Inwardly, he felt a bit of drifting fog coil across his mind. That wasn't right, was it? Potter didn't have a perfect record with the Ministry. Draco had seen that for himself, when he looked through the old files and reports for information on his new partner. He got in trouble regularly, and the fact that he was banned from St. Mungo's showed that. It was only the last one in a long line of attempts to control him and hold him back—for his own good, of course—that the Healers had made, and Potter had exasperated every one.

"I can understand that," Miranda whispered, and then sighed. "I think a few of my fellow Healers want me gone, too. I'm an embarrassment to them, what with all this attention I'm attracting."

"I don't believe that for a second!" Draco protested warmly, and locked his hands more firmly around hers when she made a motion as though she would draw them away. "What are you talking about? In what way are you an embarrassment? Yes, some of the people you worked with turned into twisted, but that has nothing to do with you."

Miranda glanced at him and then down at her pillow. "Some of the—some of the other Healers might say that that's not true," she whispered. "Because, Lewin aside, they were my protégés, and I'm responsible for what they do and say after they leave my hands."

Draco shook his head. "Is Potter responsible for what I am? Am I responsible for him? We can only do so much for the people we work with, Miranda. If we blame ourselves for everything they turn into, then we drive ourselves mad." _And I do not wish to see you mad. _His hands tightened on hers to the point that she gasped in pain, and he pulled them back at once and murmured an apology.

"It's all right." She was studying him more intensely than he had thought she would when he spoke a truth so simple. It wasn't as though he was wise, like her, and knew a lot about people from having seen them in pain.

Memories of the Cruciatus Curses that he had cast under the Dark Lord tried to intrude, and he shook his head sharply. _No. That doesn't count. There's no reason to think it counts._

Miranda reached up and traced the shape of his face. "Perhaps you're right," she whispered. "Perhaps I shouldn't blame myself so much for Lewin."

Draco nodded. "Now. Can you think of anyone else who left you and who might attack you out of jealousy? Anyone else who was using Dark Arts before he or she left? Anyone you argued with?"

Miranda frowned, her brow crimping. "I don't think so. I would be more worried about this partner of yours at this point."

"Potter?" Draco felt his muscles tighten like squeezed rubber. It bothered him, for some reason, to hear her talk about Potter, even though Draco had been the one who brought him up first. "What about him?"

"I worry that he might try to pull you out of the Aurors," Miranda said quietly. "And I worry that he got into hospital. He came to you to give you a parchment to sign—that means he was _here_, doesn't it? And that means our new defensive wards have done nothing, or he might have shattered them to come this far."

Draco shook his head. He wished she would stop talking about Potter. He wished she would go back to talking about herself instead, even mourning Lewin. It was ridiculous that she blamed herself for his death, but at least it would mean Potter, and the supposed danger to Draco, was off her mind. "I'm sure we would have heard the moaning over the wards by now, if he had really broken them to come this far. I'm _sure _he didn't, Miranda."

For a moment, she glanced up at him with a fleeting smile. "I don't remember you addressing me by my first name before."

Draco cleared his throat. "Well—I hadn't until I saw you almost die in front of me. But I think I'm allowed to, now. Aren't I?"

"Yes." And this time, it was Miranda who kissed his hands instead of the other way around, brushing his warm, smooth skin with her eyelashes lowered but her eyes visibly fixed on him. Draco went still, watching them and not heeding the motion of her lips until she whispered, "But how did Potter get here?"

"He had his Invisibility Cloak with him," Draco murmured, mesmerized by the grey in her eyes, and the tender and noble soul it revealed. He had been wrong to think he could ever love Daphne. She had been selfish and shallow. Miranda was the kind of person he would have mocked in school—upright, rule-obeying, probably a Hufflepuff when she was at Hogwarts, so much like Potter—but now, he saw the point of having a companion he could trust absolutely, rather than someone who would compete with him and mistrust him the way another Slytherin would.

"That could have fooled the wards, then," Miranda said, and stroked his hands once more before releasing them. Draco clenched them together so he wouldn't miss her warmth. "But—I am surprised. Did it seem as though anyone else knew he was here?"

"I don't know." Draco cursed his slow tongue, which couldn't tell her what she really wanted to know at the speed she wanted to know it, and concentrated on the words. "I didn't see any other Healers in the corridor while I was talking to him, so I don't think so."

"Oh, Draco." Miranda pulled back a little, which hurt hard enough that Draco thought he felt his heart actually stutter. "And you _know _we want to keep him out of hospital. Why didn't you go and alert someone about him?"

_We're partners, _Draco almost said, but that wasn't true, was it? Potter had wanted to discard him, had come here specifically to discard him. The way his parents had discarded him when he became an Auror, and the way Daphne had thrown him away because killing someone she felt had wronged her mattered more to her than spending her life with him.

The way Miranda might throw him away, if he couldn't give the right answers to her question.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't want to leave you, and I thought you might die without me being here. I'm sorry."

Miranda relaxed a little, and nodded. "I can accept that answer," she said. "But I survived, Draco. Would you go and find Healer Tella, now, and tell her that Potter came into hospital once and they should be on guard against a second try? It might be we can't stop him, not when he smashed our strongest defenses once before, but we can at least get some warning of him if he uses the Cloak again."

Draco stumbled to his feet. He felt as though he moved through syrup. On the one hand, he wanted to defend Potter, to say that he had broken free out of the best motives last time, when he thought Draco would die if he didn't—

But he had trusted too much to his visions, hadn't he? And Draco hadn't died this time, and Miranda hadn't died the time Potter supposedly had a vision of Holinshead.

And perhaps Miranda was right. It did seem strange that Potter would come all this way into hospital to get Draco to sign a parchment, when so far he had respected the ban to the point that he hadn't come into St. Mungo's to save Miranda when he thought a twisted might kill her.

Why had he stayed out, that time?

Could it be—

Draco licked his lips. No. He understood Potter, now. He could compare him to Miranda, and he knew Miranda knew him better than anyone else ever had, and he was learning to know her. Potter was too noble to abandon someone to death simply because he resented the profession they were a part of.

But he had come in to demand something ridiculous from Draco on the day that he knew he stood guard at Miranda's side. He had stayed away from her when Holinshead went after her. He had rescued her when Jerome took her hostage, but then acted as though he was more than glad to let Draco escort her back to hospital. He had stumbled on them when Lewin was going to torture her by accident.

_Would he have rescued her if I wasn't there to watch him?_

"Draco. Go, please."

Draco rode the waves of that gentle voice away, while his mind rioted with strange versions of Harry Potter.


	7. Not a Lucky Number

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—Not a Lucky Number_

"I see. Thank you for telling me." Healer Tella spoke with a grim set to her mouth, half-turning away to call over her shoulder towards someone Draco couldn't see. He had caught her in the middle of a delicate procedure on a patient on the Spell Damage Ward. She looked back at him, started to say something, and then shook her head and slammed the door.

Draco leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He wanted to hasten right back to Miranda, of course he did, but his breath was coming fast, and he also wanted to rest so he didn't do something embarrassing like collapse on the stairs on the way back to her.

His head hurt.

Of course, he thought it had hurt more or less continually since he fought with Potter. That was an odd thing, he decided, that a partner he didn't care much about—he didn't care enough that he could easily wound him, in fact—should cause him enough stress and tension for his head to hurt.

Miranda was the important one. Of course she was. He had thought he couldn't ever fall in love with anyone again, he had thought he would never have someone who understood him, and now he had someone.

It had—it had to matter.

_Why wouldn't it matter? _Draco heard the question in his head as clearly as though someone had asked it of him. He shook his head, frowning, and opened his eyes so he could make his way back up the stairs. He thought the world had stopped spinning enough that at least he wouldn't fall flat on his arse.

He discovered two Healers in bright green robes standing in front of him, one raising a monocle as if he would peer more closely at Draco's face. Draco scowled at them, but neither of them blushed at having been caught about to provide totally unnecessary care. In fact, the woman nodded in a familiar manner and reached out as if she would lay her fingers on his wrist and take his pulse that way. "Have you seen a Healer before that you like?" she asked. "We'll take your name to her, if you wish."

"I'm not here as a patient," Draco snapped, pulling his arm quickly back to his side. His left arm already hurt enough as it was, with the way he had cradled Miranda all the way to hospital, and if they saw the Dark Mark there, he didn't like to imagine what _this _lot might do. "I came in with someone who needs watching."

The Healers just nodded again, infuriatingly, as though that made sense but didn't deter them from their purpose. "It can be difficult," said the man with the monocle, "watching someone you love taken ill. But that doesn't mean you should neglect your own health. I'd say that you need to sit down and have a hearty meal and a rest. Gave blood, did you? That's always a tiresome procedure, and most wizards think they can be up and running around the corridors two minutes after it ends, heaven knows why."

"What?" Draco roared, and would have surged towards them, except his left arm pained him. He sighed and reminded himself, as the Healers stared at him, that he couldn't help Miranda if he got himself thrown out of hospital for bad behavior, the way Potter had. _Of all the examples _not _to imitate…_

"I'll be fine," he said, and tried to give the Healers a temperate smile that would make him seem responsible but stressed, not a nutter. "The woman I'm visiting is out of danger. Thank you for your concern."

The woman turned away with a sniff, but the man lingered, looking at him with a frown. Then he shook his head and said, "You still need to sit down and have something to eat, mate. You're far too pale."

Draco ground his teeth, and didn't care if the Healer heard the noise. "I didn't give anyone blood," he said. "I'll be fine. _Thank you_." The female Healer had paused up the corridor, waiting for her partner, but still the man lingered with that bloody idiotic frown wrinkling his blow, as if Draco would collapse without his support.

Finally, the man sighed and nodded, then followed the woman. Draco waited a short while to be sure they were gone, then sought out a bathroom where he could splash some water on his face and take a look in the mirror. If he looked that bad, then he might need to use a glamour. He couldn't chance being cast out of hospital or made to rest before Miranda stopped needing him.

He did look bad, he had to concede, his face pale and his eyes almost starting from his face in the midst of the pallor, or looking as if they might. He hesitated, then chose a glamour that would add just a touch of ruddy color to his cheeks. Most of the Healers in hospital were busy. They wouldn't look too closely if he seemed relatively healthy, but too-red cheeks might make them think of fever.

_Potter. I was going to firecall Potter._

But no, he wasn't. He sighed and turned towards the stairs that led to Miranda's room. No, he had come down to seek out Healer Tella on Miranda's instructions and _warn _her about Potter. It was easy to confuse orders when he was confused on that point.

Soon he was back in Miranda's room, listening to the soothing sounds of her voice and feeling the way that she poured out her attention on him like a waterfall. Draco listened, and touched, and kissed her hands when they were offered, and absorbed. It didn't matter what Miranda said, as long as Draco was there for her saying it.

And yet. He couldn't help wondering. Lewin had turned against her. It was obvious they had not gone overnight from lovers to enemies.

Who was to say that she wouldn't stop paying attention to Draco, too, if someone better came along, someone more sympathetic, who could offer her more of what she craved? She was all full of easy tenderness, but that would make it easy for her to befriend someone else, too. And Draco, all gratitude for Miranda's attention, knew he was no prize for people to plot to catch in return. Perhaps he had been once, when Daphne was still anxious to marry him, but not now.

How was he to keep hold of Miranda?

No answer presented itself to him, only the pain in his left arm, and the conviction that he had meant to firecall Potter, though both died in the wake of his happiness that Miranda was talking to him, his great happiness.

* * *

Later that night, because he was an idiot and could never leave well enough alone even when he had a partner who injured and hated him, Harry went back to the Ministry.

He had to handle the files carefully. The two wounds, one on either arm, made him weaker. His hands shook several times, and each time, Harry gritted his teeth and worked his way through the pain. This wasn't like compiling reports or sorting through files in search of some elusive fact. It wasn't work at all, not like the research on the people who had become twisted and attacked Healer Alto. It ought to be fun.

He dragged out all the files on the twisted that the Socrates Corps housed—mostly in long cabinets against the far wall where no one had a desk—and began to look through them for any sign of blue eyes, or twisted with dog-like companions, or a plague of twisted all at once, or anything else that seemed familiar from this case.

_This case. You're thinking of it like it was a single case, like these aren't separate attacks motivated by different things._

Harry frowned and shook his head. He did have to think of it that way, if only because of the blue eyes in Holinshead's and Lewin's faces, and the fact that they may have been on Jerome, too; he hadn't been the one who killed Jerome, and Malfoy had done it from behind, unable to see his eyes. Something out there, some great twisted or some powerful one, wanted Healer Alto dead.

Why, though?

_Know that and I wouldn't have to be doing this, _Harry thought, and turned to yet another report that said nothing about blue eyes.

There was an older report clipped to the back of that one, though, and more because he was reading everything in these files than because he expected it to have something useful, Harry turned it idly over.

He snorted a moment later. It was a list of the characteristics of the twisted, as if he didn't know them well enough by now. He scanned them idly anyway, nodding as he read them. Yes, the companions appeared, the dogs and the wolves and the foxes. The flaws—all of these twisted had those. The use of Dark Arts and no Healing magic. Unusual, since these had all been Healers, but not completely unheard of. The report speculated that sometimes Healers could go mad like everyone else, perhaps even more often, since they were more likely to deceive themselves into thinking they were using Dark Arts with the best of intentions.

The symbol…

Harry paused, and narrowed his eyes. He had learned the list of twisted characteristics as five, all based closely on Voldemort. Because Voldemort had had the Dark Mark, it was assumed that all twisted had a particular symbol that meant a lot to them. And he had companions, who for him were his Death Eaters, and the use of Dark Arts, and he had done no Healing except to cause more pain that Harry ever saw, and his flaw was probably his ability to create multiple Horcruxes—there was debate about that.

But the symbol wasn't listed on this particular report. Even though it had been on all the other lists Harry consulted, even though the other twisted they had confronted had symbols.

Harry flipped rapidly through other reports. All of them were conveniently and meticulously organized, in the way that Warren and Jenkins had patiently taught Harry and Malfoy, with their twisted characteristics listed on top.

And yes. There were a few without symbols. Each time, the deficiency was noted, and it was speculated that the twisted had probably had a symbol that the Aurors who had killed them simply didn't have time to see. Normally, their Dark Arts and their flaws and their companions were the things that most marked them, since a _lack _of Healing magic was also difficult to prove. Since all the wizards and witches who died because of the Socrates Corps had caused extreme damage and suffering, it wasn't a problem if they didn't fit the classical definition of a twisted or not.

But it told Harry something he hadn't known before, that there was wiggle room in the definition. Enough, perhaps, that a twisted whose flaw was striking from a distance and taking over other twisted might be able to manifest without a visible symbol.

_And he would use the flaws and the magic and the companions of the twisted he took over, _Harry thought, nodding rapidly as he reasoned it through. _And he wouldn't be able to Heal anymore than they could._

_ What if Jerome and Holinshead and Lewin all became twisted because this other twisted took them over? And that would mean—_

Here, though, Harry's own logic hanged him. At least two of those twisted had had symbols. And the blue eyes were a sort of symbol of their own. If anything, the twisted he was theorizing about here had a bigger lack, and that was the companions. He had his symbol. He had his flaw.

Harry leaned back in his chair, chewing his lip. He knew the information about the symbols was important. He _knew _it. He just didn't know how yet.

Well. The wounds on his arms were throbbing, and he at least had one piece of knowledge he hadn't known before hovering in his head. All in all, not bad for an evening's work. He nodded decisively and started to put the files back. He might figure out what was important about not having symbols if he slept on it.

* * *

Draco stumbled back into hospital after a night of blind, blank rest. He had closed his eyes and opened them, and he knew he had slept, but it didn't feel like that, not when he had been away from Miranda all that time.

_I should have stayed here, _he thought, as he ran his tongue around the inside of his teeth and felt the fuzziness there. _I would have rested better, and I know that Miranda would have been happy to have me._

The Healers in the lift stared at him oddly, probably because he had dark circles under his eyes and hadn't been able to indulge in his usual impeccable grooming. Draco willed the flush on his cheeks away and stared straight ahead. So they would look at him. What did that matter next to the way _Miranda _looked at him?

_So long as she continues to look._

That suspicion returned, banging up and down in his head the way the lift doors banged open and shut whenever someone got off at another floor. Draco began to wonder why he had taken the lift instead of the stairs. Walking would have gone faster than this endless, endless travel.

She might look at someone else. She might offer her sympathy to someone else. She had opened up to him easily, but Draco knew that he didn't have a career or looks or a life philosophy that she found attractive enough to account for that.

So her heart was open to everyone. And perhaps he ought to rejoice in that, but he couldn't, not when he wanted to be the only one occupying it.

The lift _finally _reached the right floor. Draco waited for the Healers to stream off, because he would probably curse someone if they stepped on his foot or elbowed him in the ribs right now, and hurried down the corridor that he knew would lead him to Miranda's room. One more bend, one more corner, and he could see the door.

The door with a guard in front of it.

Draco jerked to a stop, staring. He had seen at once that the guard was not in the red robes of an Auror, but it took him longer than it should have—no, he had not rested well—to place the rusty-dark robe the man was wearing. The Hit Wizards. Of course. The Hit Wizards had placed a guard on her.

_Well, and about time, too. When twisted keep attacking her._

But a guard to keep Miranda safe from twisted should still have come from the Aurors, because they were the ones who dealt with Dark wizards. (Draco did picture them asking Potter to do it, and the Healers' reaction to that, and managed a small, grim smile). Not every member of every Corps could be busy. So he walked towards the guard with what he could acknowledge was an aggressive stride, ready to reason the matter out if the man would give him the chance to do so.

"What's your name?" he asked, with an assumption of authority that he knew would probably work. People deferred more to Potter than to Draco, but they also and always deferred to someone who told them what to do in a confident tone.

The Hit Wizard, a tall, balding man with a hooked nose that could have rivaled Professor Snape's, seemed determined to be an exception to the pattern. He eyed Draco with disfavor, then snorted. "Hit Wizard Archibald Kensington, if it so please Your Majesty," he said.

Draco paused, running the name through his mind. No, he knew no Kensington, and that meant the man should have no reason to be hostile to him. He hadn't even had relatives among the Death Eaters, which was the way Draco explained the hostility of those people he knew hadn't been on the side of the Light.

"What are you doing here?" Draco demanded at last, when he could wrestle his thoughts into some kind of order. "I'm the one who's been guarding her."

"No, you've been weeping over her," Kensington corrected smartly. "Which is fine, and I'll let you through to do it some more. But you can't guard her when all you do is sit there holding her hands and staring into her eyes."

Draco stared at him, and wondered. He knew few Healers had come by yesterday after he had said that he would remain with Miranda. They had attempted to persuade him to leave hospital, but they hadn't stayed when he said he wouldn't. He had thought they respected his devotion to her and the shaking, pathetic response he had in his legs when she almost died.

His left arm hurt. He rubbed at the Mark, and watched Kensington's eyes promptly narrow in that direction.

He had _thought_ the Healers were like that. But possibly they had spies among them, and he couldn't trust them.

Possibly.

His body burned and stung, his blood foaming in his veins, as he thought of another possibility.

Potter had come to the room. Potter had seen him weeping, and might have stood there watching for hours, for all Draco knew, thanks to that bloody Invisibility Cloak of his. He could have avoided the Healers. Miranda had said that none of them knew he was there, or they would have done something to banish them from hospital.

Potter could have gone back to the Ministry—in fact, he probably had when he couldn't get Draco to sign that sodding parchment—and told them that Draco was "weeping" over Miranda. Draco could hear the tone of voice he would use to do it, too. After all, how many times had he heard Potter's scorn directed at himself?

And Miranda…she might have known. What if the next rival he had to worry about losing her to was _Potter_? She hadn't seen him kill except with Lewin, and it was possible that shock kept her from remembering the true extent of that, since she had never mentioned it when she was talking over Lewin's death. She knew Potter had used Dark Arts and violence, but she had been away from Holinshead's death, and Draco had killed Jerome. She might think of him as someone else she could turn to in Draco's wake, someone who would protect her but who she hadn't persuaded into reconsidering the importance of twisted and Dark Arts yet.

"Malfoy." Kensington's voice was somewhere on the far side of the haze, the haze caused by the steady drum of his heart in his ears and the way his fingers curled. "Are you all right? You don't look it."

"I'm fine," Draco said, and turned away. He needed to go. He needed to seek. He needed to find. He didn't know exactly what he would do when he found it, but he knew he needed to go. He threw one quick smile over his shoulder at Kensington, who he couldn't see through the haze possessing him, but that was all right. He knew he could do something that would make the haze go.

Find Potter. He had to find Potter.

He ran through the corridors of hospital, and no one stopped him. Once he thought he saw Healer Tella staring after him, but it didn't matter, because she didn't get in his way. Another time, the two Healers who had confronted him last night called his name, or something that sounded like his name. Draco couldn't be sure, because the sound warped and blurred and wouldn't travel correctly. And he didn't want it to, not when he was sure it would be an attempt to talk him out of what he knew he had to do. He bent his head and continued to run.

After a while, he became aware of something running beside him. No, not things, creatures, and there were several of them. He looked ahead and back, and yes, there they were. They had upright ears and long, lean bodies, and he knew them from the memory of a picture book he had read when he was a child. Jackals. They were jackals, and they were made of sparkling mist like the kind that filled his mind.

Draco smiled. He knew it was a good sign they were there, that Miranda had sent them to protect him.

He would find Potter. He knew what he had to do once he had the confession. He was an Auror, and good Aurors always got a confession first.

He drew his wand. The roaring haze still filled his mind, but that was all right. In a short time, he could share it.

* * *

Another day, another eight hours among the files. Grumbling, Harry dragged out and looked at report after report, and he did locate more and more twisted who didn't have the symbol on their arms or painted on the walls of their cells—the way Latham, their last twisted before the Alto case, had done—or anywhere on their bodies at all.

But there was no consistent pattern between them that he could find.

Some had no symbol because they died so quickly and their bodies burned so thoroughly that any symbol would have been destroyed. Some were only historical cases, Socrates Aurors theorizing that Dark wizards defeated years ago would actually have been twisted, only that definition didn't exist at the time. And some had no symbol, definitely, but seemed as destructive and dangerous as the ones that did.

The only things Harry knew for certain were that the definition of twisted was nowhere near as firm as he'd been led to believe, and that he had a headache. He leaned back in his chair, rubbed his head, and sighed.

Abruptly, a silvery figure formed in front of him. Harry blinked and sat up. A sleek creature with a slim tail—he thought it was a weasel—gave him a brisker nod than he'd ever got from a Patronus and said, in Healer Tella's voice, "I saw Auror Malfoy rush past me a few moments ago, probably bound for the Ministry. Whatever has distressed him, I thought you should know about it, as he has watched over our Miranda Alto most of the night."

The Patronus dissolved. Harry blinked at where it had been, and rubbed his chin. _Why in the world would she think me worthy of warning?_

Something slammed into the office door. Harry whirled around, his nostrils flaring, and rose to his feet as he gripped his wand. If Malfoy had got word of another twisted heading his way and come to help, the twisted might have come before he could.

The door flew open. Malfoy stood there, silhouetted against the light from the corridor beyond, smiling at him. Dog-like shapes of shine and shadow crowded around him, crouched and snarling.

"Potter," Malfoy said pleasantly. "I knew it was you. I thought I would give you something to remember me by."

He didn't point his wand, and he didn't cast a curse. Instead, confusion flooded Harry's head. Had he really gone to hospital yesterday to get Malfoy's signature on the parchment that would end their partnership? But why? Could it be that he wanted to destroy Malfoy more than he wanted to work alone? Did he bear resentment towards him because Malfoy had wounded him? But that was understandable, he was under a lot of stress—

The dog-like shapes leaped for him, and behind him came Malfoy, eyes never wavering from Harry's face, on fire with darkness.


	8. Eight Blasts of Truth

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—Eight Blasts of Truth_

Draco watched Potter tumble to the ground, engaged with the jackals, and smiled against the murder in his heart. Well. That was it, then. He could go back to Miranda and report that one of his rivals was gone with a clean conscience.

But would she want him gone? For the first time, Draco hesitated on that score. Miranda might favor Potter and need him close for some as-yet-unfathomed reason that Draco would find out later. He wanted to do whatever made her happy. If taking Potter away made her _unhappy_, then Draco and only Draco would be responsible for that, and she might dismiss him from her company because of it.

He clenched his fists in front of him, and then pulled the jackals off Potter with a sharp backwards blow of his arm. Their every bite furthered and increased the confusion Draco had sent spilling into Potter's mind. By now, he should be dazed enough that Draco could interrogate him with no further danger to himself.

The jackals snarled, but obeyed him. They were his companions, after all.

There was something disturbing in the thought, and Draco paused to contemplate it.

At that moment, Potter surged to his feet and aimed his wand at him.

Draco opened his mouth to bark, or laugh, at him for his presumption, for thinking that he could manage a spell that would bring Draco down _now_, when Draco was the only one in the room who knew what was going on—

"_Expelliarmus!_"

The spell tore Draco's wand away from him, and sent it flying to Potter's hand. Potter smiled at him, and although he was wobbly on his feet and his eyes were crossing, he still staggered towards Draco, panting something about how he would always be the better one and Draco should just _understand _that and give up now—

Draco snarled and snapped his hand out again. From Miranda to him to Potter, the confusion poured down. Potter wavered to a stop and then put both hands to his temples, pressing the wands up against his ears.

"You can't stand against me," Draco whispered. "You cannot replace me with Miranda. There would be many other ways I would be willing to let you go and live your life, but not this time, not in this way."

Potter, weaving back and forth exactly as though he'd had too much Firewhisky, raised his eyes to Draco. Draco didn't expect the understanding and grief and anger he saw in them, none of it. He charged back and forth between all emotions except his love of Miranda, why shouldn't Potter do the same thing when affected by Draco's magic?

His flaw.

"You're a twisted," Potter whispered. "She turned you into one. I don't believe it. She _did_. I never thought of that. A twisted whose flaw is making other people who spend time with her into twisted. I don't think she knows she's doing it. Possibly she can't control it. Oh, Merlin."

Draco roared and struck at him again, so he shouldn't know which direction was up, or which down, or whether the room was standing still or swaying. Perhaps he couldn't even see, now, with all the colors that had to be swimming across his vision. "Shut the fuck up, Potter," he whispered, his voice savage with his hatred. "You don't have the least _notion_ of what you're saying. You don't understand."

"I understand more than you think," Potter said, and his face still had an arrested expression, and he still sounded as though he was pursuing an intelligent, reasoned line of conversation, although Draco should have made both those impossible. "The symbol. That was why it mattered to me, why it nagged at me and wouldn't go away. She doesn't have one. But she has a flaw, and I've never _seen _her heal. If she did, she might have used Dark Arts, the way Jerome was trying to." He frowned a moment and stared into the distance. "But her companions?"

"Shut _up!_" Draco had lost control of this conversation that shouldn't even be a conversation somehow, and he didn't know how. Another step nearer, another blast of Dark magic at Potter—

His left arm ached, and for a moment he remembered the Mark and how long it had hurt, that it made him hurt when it sensed Dark magic, and that he should—

_No!_ Not possible. Not real. Miranda wasn't using Dark magic. She hadn't had a chance to pick up a wand since Lewin tried to kill her. Draco hadn't seen her cast a spell yet. She was herself, the innocent woman who had given a chance to him, a less than innocent man, and he wouldn't let Potter slander her in this way.

Potter fell to one knee, now with his fingers trembling so badly on the wands that surely he would drop them any second. Draco tensed to lunge forwards, ready to snatch them up and carry them away if he had the chance.

But Potter didn't drop them yet. He reared back with a cry, his mouth so open that Draco had to turn his head away or stare down his throat, and whispered, "The others she corrupts, the ones she turns into twisted. _Those _are her companions. I know from the historical cases that sometimes they're enchanted people instead of charmed animals or specters. Like the Death Eaters who served Voldemort."

"Shut up, Potter," Draco said gently. "You don't know what you're talking about." The thought had come to him that if he wanted Potter to shut up, the best thing really was to go and do it himself rather than wait for his flaw or something else—something miraculous, it seemed to him at this point, would be needed—to do it. He took a step forwards and lashed out with one foot, hitting Potter in the gut.

Potter wavered and fell. Draco snatched up his wand and thought for a moment of stepping on and splintering on Potter's holly wand. But there would be time for that later. Right now, he wanted to punish Potter more than he wanted to cripple him.

And crippling was pointless when he would die soon in any case.

He gestured the jackals forwards.

* * *

Harry wanted to weep as he lay there, and he didn't know why. He knew he had lost something, but not what. Draco was turning against him, but that had always been going to happen. He had known it in some part of himself, from the moment he and Malfoy became partners. Why should he mourn it _now_?

But he did. In some way that he didn't know, and didn't understand, he _did._

He had the sense that the revelations he had come to were more important, though, and so he stubbornly clung to them as teeth raked the arms he raised to defend his face, laying open skin to the bone, sending the blood flowing. A jackal's teeth locked gently on his groin when he would have kicked, and so he lay there, screaming as they bit him, but with his mind not screaming, just drifting in and out on gentle, overlapping waves of confusion.

The confusion hurt, but that didn't matter, nothing mattered except that he had been right about Healer Alto. She was a twisted, but of a unique kind. She didn't reach out to control people far away from her the way the unknown twisted with blue eyes did. She did it to the people right beside her, and made them into more traditional twisted than she was herself.

Harry closed his eyes. He was losing skin and flesh. Then one of the jackals bit down, and he knew a finger was gone, because there was no other explanation for the stunning pain in his hand, and it ached, and he hurt, and he wept, and there were thick, bloody-dark tears on his cheek.

He would probably die here, and then none of those revelations would matter.

And because he had endured pain in his life and survived it, because he was accustomed to surviving no matter what happened, and because lying down and dying would feel like cheating when he joined Lionel, he relaxed some of the barriers he kept up and let _go_.

The force of magic that flooded the room was uncoordinated and ungainly, the awkward thumps of an adolescent who had no skill with his fists, or at least with his wand. The walls trembled, Harry did know that, and something fell off a shelf with a thump. The jackals flew away from him, and Harry felt the warm drip of blood across his face where one of them, still gnawing, sprayed him with some of the flesh it carried with it. He heard a shriek that was probably Draco slamming into the desk and breaking something.

Harry closed his eyes and continued pumping out more magic, sheer raw strength, the very thing he had been told never to do when he passed through his Auror training. There was nothing for it but this. There was nothing that mattered but this. He knew he was hurting Draco, but he found it hard to care, when Draco had cared so much more about hurting _him_. He let go the long processes it had taken him to master his wand, the way he had learned not to use Dark magic where most people could see it, the way he had learned to cope with his visions.

Hell, it wasn't as if the visions of other victims' murders would be useful to him in the future, when he was dead. They sure hadn't warned him about the tortures he would suffer. He pushed them out, too, and his head felt clean and dry and empty.

Empty of confusion.

He rolled up to one knee, bracing himself carefully with the hand that was missing the second finger, and saw Malfoy crouched against the far wall. His arms were around his head, but not in the way that they would have been if he was trying to shield himself against future attacks, Harry thought. He looked like someone clinging to a physical spar, or trying to, against a battering mental sea.

Harry looked around for the jackals, and didn't see them. It was possible they didn't exist when Malfoy wasn't concentrating on them, he was such a new twisted. Larkin, whom they had chased on their previous case, hadn't always been accompanied by his own personal companions either, especially when they arrested him.

Malfoy was a twisted.

And the mission of the Socrates Aurors was to kill the twisted.

Harry shifted his weight. He looked around and found his wand lying on the floor a short distance away. One stretch, and he would have it back in hand. He could use it to kill Malfoy then, and no one would blame him, not when they saw the messy red ruin of his finger, not when they heard the story.

No one would blame him, except himself.

"Malfoy," Harry said softly. He was wary of intruding into that struggle Malfoy looked to be having, but at the same time, he didn't know any other way to catch his attention. And he would need help from Malfoy himself to combat the influence Alto had used on him. "Wake up and tell me what happened."

Shadows stirred in the corners of the room, shadows with teeth and bright eyes. Harry ignored them as best he could, and took a step towards Malfoy. Malfoy made a whimpering noise low in his throat and promptly scooted away from him, raising his hand as though to shield himself against a blow.

_So I'm the scary one now? What the fuck? _Harry hadn't seen other twisted act like this, but then, he had barely been around them before they attacked, so he hadn't had the chance. And they were mad by definition, and might do anything at a split second's notice. "Malfoy?" he repeated, and stepped closer to him.

"Go away." Malfoy's voice, but with an edge to it Harry had never heard before. It pointed itself against his throat, and his fingers closed around his wand without meaning to use it. Then he grimaced. With the slot where his finger had been still dripping hot and useless and slippery against the wood, he might not be _able _to use it, but of course he hadn't thought of that before.

"You don't understand," Malfoy said, before Harry could decide what to say in response. "Go away. You can't understand about Miranda. You can't understand about Daphne. You don't care about me. No one does, except her." Then his head jerked to the side, and he made an ugly noise that sounded like it should have shattered one of his teeth. "But I have to—she'll leave me. So she doesn't know, either."

Harry licked his lips, and took a risk, settling back on his heels so he was at Malfoy's level. If Alto had made Malfoy into a twisted, she had done it awfully quickly, far more quickly than she had with the other people Harry had read about in the files, all of whom had worked with her for months. Possibly the effect would wear off more the longer Malfoy spent away from her. Harry didn't know if he could help, or if his help would only make things worse, but he knew that he _wanted _to help.

He glanced over his shoulder. The jackals had faded again, but the teeth were still there in the distance, a glimpse of flash and snap.

"You're afraid I might replace you at her side?" Harry asked. That was taking a risk, too, reminding Malfoy of his mad ravings, but it was something that had to be done. He might have come up with a way to lead Malfoy back to himself, but it would only work if he was right about what Malfoy's problem with him was in the first place.

Malfoy's teeth snapped at him, and the jackals snarled more loudly from the corner. Harry forced himself not to glance back and see if they were turning solid again. The important thing was to keep his eyes on Malfoy.

"You will," Malfoy whispered. "You're the hero who saved her life, after all. And you're not the one she took to task about the Dark Arts."

Harry nodded. Well, he doubted everything was so straightforward as Malfoy made it sound, even if Alto _had _spoken to him about Dark Arts use, but that didn't matter. What mattered was bringing Malfoy back from the edge and ensuring he didn't go over it again.

_Which might mean facing Alto alone._

Harry shrugged and cast a spell that numbed a bit of the pain in his missing finger as it tried to claim his attention. He would do that if he had to. He was so used to doing things if he had to that sometimes he thought doing something because he wanted to might be a novel experience.

"I would never, ever seek to replace you with her," he said. "Do you want to know why?"

"Because you've never listened to her long enough to know how splendid she is!" Malfoy sat up and pointed a shaking finger at him; Harry watched his hand and wondered if he could spare one. "If you had, you would know that she's tender and wonderful, and even offered to treat you after you were banned from hospital. And how do you repay her? By sneaking in and trying to get me to sign that bloody parchment!"

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Do you want to sign it now? And I could sign a piece saying I'll never go near Alto, if you like." That would get him out of revealing what he was steadily suspecting he would have to reveal to Malfoy, and that was enough to make him clutch at the solution.

Malfoy shook his head, looking like a wounded, cornered dog now. Harry heard another clash of teeth from behind him, and stiffened, trying desperately not to anticipate the way sharp fangs might close in the flesh at the base of his spine. "It's no _good_, you idiot, don't you understand? I have to—I have to—" He closed his eyes and lifted a hand as if he would claw at the shut eyelids.

Harry sighed. So he would have to tell the truth, after all. Well. It was unlikely Malfoy would remember it or attach much importance to it, after, when they were dealing with the mess he had made as a twisted and the mess Alto had made of his life and the lives of everyone else who had come near her.

"I would never want to be with her," he said, "unless she cast some spell that made me want to—"

Malfoy tried to stand, with a growl that made his throat vibrate, but only ended up sliding down the wall again. Harry nodded. That confirmed something he had suspected: the process of transformation into a twisted was nearly as exhausting as the process of trying to save someone from it. And Malfoy hadn't been one for long, at least if the way he was acting was any indication. He still wasn't easy with it, and the other twisted had shown the inclination to kill Alto and not other people, besides.

"Because I was in love with Lionel," Harry said.

Malfoy paused, and his head lifted at that. "Your former partner?"

_My partner, now and forever. _It would have been a crime to say _that_, however, just in case Malfoy did remember later. Harry swallowed and nodded, looking at the far wall.

"Lionel Vane. He—he knew." _And never trusted me, had to wonder if I'd saved him because we were partners and friends or because I wanted us to be lovers and if that meant I wouldn't guard his back as well from now on, tried his best to avoid the topic and what he could see burning in my eyes every time I looked at him…_ "Malfoy, it's something that I try to forget, and it's the central fact of my life. I loved him, and he died."

"So, you wouldn't want to be with Miranda because you're bent."

Harry sighed and nodded. "Yes, exactly."

Malfoy shoved himself forwards, then shook his head. "You can't be. You haven't looked at me the same way, and I know I'm enough to tempt any man." Harry controlled his snort at that. He should be glad for the arrogance seeping through the words. It meant he had a chance of luring Malfoy further back into himself, instead of further away. "And I haven't seen you look at anyone else, either."

"As if you've been looking," Harry said, trying not to tense. He had promised himself that he would lay down his barriers if necessary to bring Malfoy back, because no one deserved the fate Alto would have made him suffer. Was he holding back on his promise now? Did he want to keep some scrap of privacy clutched to himself?

_Did I really think I could?_

"But you haven't dated a man, either," Malfoy continued obsessively. "It's just this one, this Lionel, who wouldn't look at you back?"

Harry tossed his head up in spite of himself. Malfoy chuckled, but Harry put aside his instinctive reaction to the sound and scowled at him. "How do you know that?"

"Because no one ever mentioned it. A crush the Chosen One had? That could stay secret—although I'm surprised it did—but not a date. Not a lover." Malfoy pushed himself even closer, on elbows and knees, as though he'd forgotten what it was to stand. "He refused you. And you didn't find someone else?"

So he would have to tell it, after all. Well, Harry had been prepared for that, or he wouldn't have started on this story in the first place. So he licked his lips and plunged into the heart of it.

"It wasn't—I'm not bent, as far as I know," he said, and ignored the way Malfoy laughed. "I was just in love with him. Before, I had a crush or I was infatuated and _thought _I was in love, but after Lionel, I understand the difference now. He occupied my attention and my time. I would have done anything for him. Used Dark Arts, killed for him, died for him, betrayed my friends for him." That was the night he had spent sitting up in bed, running his hands over his head and trying to understand what was happening to him. Ron and Hermione were more important to him than the women he dated or thought about dating, they always had been. Until Lionel. "I would have been happy if he hadn't withdrawn from me, even if he wouldn't date me. And since him, there's nothing. I just got cut off from something that—I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't have been as wonderful as I think it would. But there's been nothing since him, no interest, nothing." He lowered his hands from his face and stared at Malfoy. "And that's why I can assure you I have absolutely no interest in taking your place with Healer Alto. Whatever she's done to you," he added, because he still had no intention of letting Malfoy forget she was a twisted, if he _did _manage to get him back to normal.

* * *

Draco didn't think he'd felt that way about Daphne, and he had wanted to marry her. Or Miranda, and—the distance was tearing the answers out of him now—he didn't think he could.

Of course, he also thought Potter was describing obsession, not love, and he wanted to remark that Potter could as easily feel that for one person as for another, even if he was convinced at the moment he couldn't.

But his head was clearing, warping and turning and twisting, and he understood certain things that hadn't been comprehensible to him only moments before.

He had suddenly had companions. He had had a flaw. He had come here intending to kill Potter, although looking back now, his reasons seemed so flimsy that they shouldn't have convinced him for an instant.

He didn't know if he could go near Miranda again.

And what he had expected to be a tearing pain, like cutting off a limb, simply—evaporated from him.

Draco shook his head and blinked and came back to himself, and that was when he noticed one of Potter's fingers was gone.

"Shit!" He scrambled to his feet and reached hastily for his wand, casting the Summoning Charm without thought. The finger, looking much more like a scrap of meat than it should now that it was separated from Potter's hand, came soaring over to him. Draco cringed, but accepted it on his open palm. He reached for Potter.

Potter shied. "You know the proper spells to attach it?" he demanded. "If not, then I'd just as soon do it, thanks."

Draco shuddered and stared at him. Potter looked back. Draco didn't see the guarded walls he usually did, the barriers that held him away from all the tender places in Potter he might mock, but that didn't mean he saw _trust_, either.

He had tortured Potter. His eyes went to the other wounds, including the opened ones in his arms, one of which he had inflicted, and his gut twisted and heaved for the first time since the war.

"We need to go to hospital," he said.

Potter snorted. "Exactly where I've been banned from, and where you can't go. It's not safe for you to be near her."

Draco had to shut his eyes and turn away for a moment, to deal with what Potter's concern did to him after Draco was the one partially responsible for this. Then he shook his head and said, "Then we'll find a Healer who doesn't mind working independently." He saw Potter open his mouth from the corner of his eye and said sharply, "Shut it. We're dealing with this first, no matter what M—Healer Alto does next."

He expected an argument, or an insistence that a twisted on the loose mattered more than Potter's own injuries. He had done that during the Larkin case.

Instead, Potter studied him with narrowed eyes, then nodded. "Fine. But let's move quickly. We don't know how conscious she is of her flaw, and we don't know what she might do when you don't return."

He stood, and wavered, probably from loss of blood. Draco reached out to support him.

And that was when the last trace of the jackals faded from the shadows.


	9. Three By Three

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—Three by Three_

"Brace yourself. This will hurt."

Harry gritted his teeth and braced his shoulders against the wall as best he could. There were some good things, it had turned out, about having a partner who was all but a literal bastard. He knew independent Healers who didn't mind working for Galleons, and who kept their quarters at a distance from St. Mungo's, so a Healer from there was less likely to spot Harry walking into them. This was a little stone building that hugged the earth, and had dim and smoky rooms. Harry had been reluctant to trust the wizard who lived here to reattach his finger.

Then Malfoy had taken his shoulder and told him what was going to happen in a flat voice, and he had realized it wasn't really his decision to make.

He had a partner. Someone he couldn't trust at the moment, that was true, someone who would never be to him what Lionel was and had odd lights in his eyes whenever he looked at Harry now, but someone who wouldn't let him suffer, because that would impair his effectiveness in battle and thus endanger Malfoy. Harry therefore extended his hand as he sat in the lumpy chair in the Healer's lab with more confidence than he would have otherwise.

The Healer, a weedy man who had told Harry to call him Alfred, bent over his hand and frowned at the place the finger had been bitten off. His wand flicked back and forth, and Harry felt random diagnostic spells dance over him. Then Alfred seized the finger and jammed it back into place, spitting out an unfamiliar incantation at the same moment.

Harry bit his lip as his head sagged back against the wall, instinctively stifling the scream that wanted to escape. Malfoy was beside him, stroking his hair and forehead with one hand and whispering into his ear. Harry didn't pay attention to the whispers. Malfoy could get someone to heal him, fine, but soothing him was out of the question.

Besides, no one had ever been any good at soothing him since he'd lost Lionel.

The pain was like the jackal bite in reverse. Harry thought he could feel skin reaching out and joining, crawling out of something's mouth, scraping past teeth. He gritted his own teeth and bit down another scream.

"It would be better if you would scream," Malfoy whispered into his ear.

_Better for who? _Harry wanted to ask, but opening his mouth would release the sound that wasn't words. He only knew, as the pain grew worse and he thought he heard the sounds of bone snapping—or unsnapping—that Malfoy wanted him to make a noise, and he wouldn't. He jammed his eyes shut and sat there, teeth grinding against each other, imagining the loss of all the enamel on them as he thought about it.

"There. Done."

Alfred's voice shattered the silent state in which Harry floated. He sat up and looked at his hands, spread across his lap in front of him. The finger was attached, as far as he could see, with only a faint circle of waxy skin marking the place where it had once been torn from the hand. Harry took in a breath, let it out, and then tried to flex the finger.

It bent.

Harry smiled, and shared the fierce look with Malfoy before he remembered. He shook his head and turned back to Alfred, ignoring the way Malfoy's hand tightened on his shoulder. "What do I owe you?"

"Your friend already paid it." Alfred had turned away and was washing his wand in a small fountain that had sprung up from the floor, and stank like acid. He didn't look at Harry as he added, "I don't want to know, okay? You were never here."

"Right," Harry said. After a second, he rejected the idea that he should try to pay anyway, so he wouldn't be in Malfoy's debt. You could look at it as Malfoy being in _his _debt, since he was the one who had unleashed his jackals on Harry in the first place, and been the one responsible for the loss of the finger. He turned away, walking towards the door with shaky steps, but on his own. He shrugged off Malfoy's arm when it tried to curl around his shoulders.

"You would be better off if you would let me help you," Malfoy said into his ear as they passed down the short entrance hall and back into the street that the house stood on. If you could call it a "street," Harry thought. It was a dirt path, really, widening as it ran towards the nearest village, narrowing again as it came back towards Alfred's domain. "Just as you would be better off if you'd screamed."

Harry looked at him with his teeth bared. "Why? Because it would have confirmed your opinion that I'm weak?"

Malfoy showed him teeth back. "Because you're going to need your strength to fight Alto. Wasting it holding back your screams is useless."

"I don't scream like that unless something takes me by surprise," Harry said shortly. "The way the jackal bite did." He changed the subject, because Malfoy was opening his mouth and looked, bizarrely, as if he wanted to pursue it. "Anyway. We need to go after her. It's dangerous for you, and hard for me to get into hospital in the first place. Any thoughts?"

Malfoy struggled for a moment against his own obvious impulse to control Harry, and then shrugged. "You'll go in under a disguise."

Harry frowned. "You warned them about my Invisibility Cloak, you said." That was part of the information Malfoy had told him as they made their way to Alfred's house. "They'll be on the lookout for that, and for any glamours we can use. What makes you think I can get past the defenses on the inside to see Alto?"

"Because we'll use Dark magic, of course," Malfoy said, staring at him as if he was stupid. "And of the kind that no wards the Healers can spin will detect."

Harry found the strength to give Malfoy a real smile at last. "Now you're speaking my language. What are the incantations?"

* * *

Potter was fragile.

Draco had no surprise when he thought that. Potter had just gone through a torture session, and while Alfred had healed the cuts and bites on his body as well as reattached the finger, he should have rested. Then there was that stupid expenditure of strength in holding back the scream, and rejecting Draco's support when he was limping out. Draco understood more now about why he might want to do those kinds of things—he thought it of as a tribute to his dead lover, that was clear—but not why he actually _did _them. Survival had to come first.

And revenge, although luckily in this case revenge coincided with their Ministry-given mission.

They stood an alley away from the front door of St. Mungo's, disguised as men so filthy and reeking that Muggles avoided them instinctively and no wizards had yet given them a second glance. If they spoke to each other in whispers, well, people like that were always mumbling something, it seemed.

"I'll get past the wards with that one, you said." Potter tilted his head back and frowned. They leaned on the filthy stone and paid no mind to the way that people squinted at them for it. There were more important things at stake, Draco knew, and they could always use Cleaning Charms later. "Any idea how I'm going to kill Alto, especially if she knows how to use her flaw and she'll charm me as soon as I get close enough?"

"Take her by surprise, of course," Draco said softly. He watched the sheen in Potter's eyes, wondering why he hadn't thought of that, and then realized. _Fragile. Of course. _"Give her a fair chance, and she'll kill you. You have to stab her in the back."

Potter narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. He nodded. "What signal do you want me to give so you know when to come after me and help me out of there?"

"So certain you'll need help?" Draco couldn't help breathing on the back of Potter's neck. He squirmed and stepped away. Draco stepped back in turn. He could live with that much acknowledgment.

"Yes," Potter said. "With Alto dead, you won't have anything to worry about. You can walk in openly. But I might not have enough left to both get back out of hospital and survive the battle."

"You don't have to worry."

Potter jerked first, but Draco was the one who turned with his wand out. Behind them stood a tall woman in blue robes with a long, whippy willow wand in one hand. She glanced at both of them and nodded when she had finished the scan, as though they had pleased her or at least not surprised her.

Draco found himself watching her eyes. They were a light blue-grey and exuded none of the dangerous fascination that Alto's did, but he distrusted it anyway, this fortuitous appearance of a woman who seemed to know what they were about and hadn't yet tried to stop them.

"Who are you?" Potter demanded. Draco grimaced. He would have made the demand with more grace, but perhaps it didn't matter. The woman only smiled at Potter's question and inclined her head.

"You don't recognize the family resemblance?" She picked up a strand of dark hair. "I'm shocked. My name is Annette Holinshead, and I've learned what happened to my sister." Her smile was sweet and vicious. "She would never have become a twisted if not for her precious _Miranda_, more important to her than anyone in the family. I want vengeance."

Draco frowned. He hadn't seen Holinshead until after she was dead, but he had to admit this woman looked like the dead twisted. And Potter, who had fought her and looked into her eyes from less than a foot away, was straightening up slowly, a hard-edged smile playing with the corners of his mouth.

"You're sure that you want this?" he asked. "You have no idea what Alto's done, not really. You can't."

"I can examine files." Holinshead reached into her robe pocket, with careful, exaggerated movements, and drew out a thin book filled with what seemed, to Draco, like sheets of creamy parchment. "And I can draw on the one resource that you wouldn't have any idea existed. My sister's diary." Her own mouth twisted, and her hand twitched as if she would fling it from her. "She recorded what was happening to her. Every detail, every inch of what that bitch did to her."

Draco felt a flash like winter in him, and shuddered. It was the impulse to defend Alto, to call her Miranda. Yes, it was a good thing he was staying out here. It would have been dangerous for him to go near Alto when he felt like that.

"Malfoy?"

Potter was watching him. Potter had seen. Draco shuddered and shook his head. "Sorry, but I'm not going to trust someone who walks out of nowhere at a convenient time," he drawled. "I suspect you wouldn't have any objection to Veritsaerum?"

"Of course not." Holinshead pulled back her hair as though she assumed it would get in the way of distributing the potion and opened her mouth.

Potter blinked at him. "You have Veritaserum?"

Draco shrugged. It was part of the arsenal that he carried with him, most of the time, in case they needed to interrogate a witness who was being stubborn in giving them information. He used Dark magic, so why was it such a _huge _stretch to assume he would use illegal potions? he added in the silence of his head as he watched Potter's eyes widen. Some people were better-prepared than others and thought about different weapons, that was all.

Potter watched in silence as he drew the vial out and used the stopper to place three drops on Holinshead's tongue. Holinshead rolled her eyes and swallowed, and then her face changed to a pale, passive lack of expression as the potion took hold.

Potter leaped in first, of course. "Are you Annette Holinshead?" he demanded.

"Yes." Flat, the way it should be.

Draco took up the next question, the one that he didn't think Potter would have the sense enough to ask. "Are you the sister of Sarah Holinshead, the twisted that we killed a few days ago?"

"Yes." No hesitation, and no flicker of something like triumph in the back of those blue-grey eyes.

"Why are you doing this?" Potter inserted then. "Why come to us?"

Draco glanced sideways at him. Potter seemed to have forgotten his distrust of Draco, at least enough to be near him when they were doing something like this. That was good. They worked well together as partners when they forgot to fight, and Draco intended to see that they went on doing so.

"Because no one else will help me avenge my sister." Holinshead was saying words that Draco knew she would probably have given a sneer at at most times, but now she was smoothed out and calmed under the influence of the potion. "Everyone else will say that she was a vicious twisted and deserved what she got. I know it's more than that. She's _worth _more than that."

"And you want Healer Alto dead?" Draco asked. Holinshead seemed to mean what she said, but she wasn't a trained warrior. Draco wanted to know if she would falter when they were going in for the execution.

"I want her torn. I want her scraped. I want her bleeding."

Draco nodded. At least that much was on the level.

"How did you find us?" Potter asked, and Draco had to stop his hand before it could reach out and touch Potter's shoulder blade in admiration. That was a question _he _should have thought of, and asked before now, but he hadn't.

"You're the Aurors assigned to the case." Holinshead looked between them, and her lips twitched as if she wanted to force them into a smile but didn't have the will. "Not hard to follow and find when you don't care about what the consequences will be, as long as they include Healer Alto broken."

Draco asked a few more questions, but he had to admit that her answers to all of them seemed to be true. And he himself had brewed the Veritaserum, and during a time when he was calm and concentrated on his work, so he didn't think the potion was giving Holinshead room to lie.

Potter nodded at Holinshead as the potion started to wear off and sense crept softly back into her eyes. "You can come with me, then. Help me sneak into hospital."

Holinshead bowed her head, but before she could say anything, a voice spoke from behind him, and it made Draco's spine ache. "Why would you need to do that? I can come and treat you, if you need it." A pause. "And you look like you need it."

Draco turned slowly. Alto stood behind them, bright-dark eyes staring back and forth between him and Harry and Holinshead. "You could have come to me if you needed help," she whispered. "You, too, Annette. I'm fond of Sarah still, in my memories, even if she did try to kill me."

Everything happened very fast then.

* * *

Harry acted instinctively. Malfoy was an idiot and a bastard who should have known better than to think Harry would trust him immediately after he tortured him, but he was also someone who had suffered from Alto's ability to make someone else into a twisted. Harry knew he had to protect him from the flaw she might be wielding again, at the moment, simply by talking to him face-to-face. Malfoy stood still enough that Harry thought he was listening.

And that was not acceptable. He would not fail another partner again, not after Lionel. He _would not_.

He sprang between Malfoy and Holinshead and Alto, and he cast the first spell that came to mind, one of the Dark incantations that he would have used on the twisted before this if there had been time. "_Veritas repens!"_

The spell rushed forwards as a wind, and carried him into the depths of Alto's mind before he could breathe or blink. This wasn't Legilimency; it was a pouring-out of truth, a tearing and a dumping, breaking down the walls that had loomed in Alto's mind and kept her from any knowledge of what she was doing.

Because that was the case, Harry realized suddenly, swimming in her thoughts, immersed in her grief and her anger. She hadn't known she was twisted. She hadn't corrupted people on purpose. She had talked to them, and they had fallen into new patterns of thought. And then they would make some effort to claim her and keep her away from others, and she would object to that, and they would hate her for it.

She created obsession, said the magic that foamed around him in a bright crimson sea, carrying truth back to him. She created twisted who were driven insane by their own fascination. And she did not know it.

_No. I couldn't have done that—I would have known—_

More walls flew apart with silent explosions, green and blue barriers, emerald and sapphire, breaking down. She could ignore her own flaw, but it had taken work, the work of her own mind and her own fear, to make her aware that she no longer used Healing magic, that every spell she cast to ease patients' suffering was a Dark one. She had gone too far into Dark magic that could be used for such purposes, she had investigated and wept when she couldn't save lives and vowed to do so, and had tipped, almost gently, over the edge into madness without realizing it.

She was crying. Harry leaped out of her mind and opened his eyes, and found her with the tears sliding down her cheeks, her hand reaching out as if she was catching the last of her deception and cradling it against her. Harry stared at her, feeling sorry for her and hating her at the same time, and felt the lash of power that uncurled from her, so neat and delicate you wouldn't know it was there.

Her flaw.

Draco roared in agony and charged.

At Harry.

Holinshead reacted before Harry could, raising a barrier that Draco slammed into. He ran his hands over it, snarling, his face so distorted that Harry didn't think he would have known him without having seen his expression change. Harry shuddered. He had never yet seen Draco forget to use his wand. Turning to the use of hands first was something more Muggle-raised and Muggleborn wizards did than pure-bloods.

But Alto was still reaching, the whip of power curling its tendrils in the air like a plant. That was what she did, Harry realized. She found those she thought were a threat to her and made them into friends.

But because it was a flaw, Dark magic by nature, it wasn't enough to put them under a mild Imperius-like effect and then leave them to come out of it when they were away from her. It made them slaves, and killers. It made them disregard everything else but her.

_I should never have let Draco come this close, _Harry decided, and raised his own defense against the flaw. Images of Lionel passed through his mind like a lightning storm. The bright dark eyes, the way he laughed and shut his eyes sometimes when he did, even the way he turned away from Harry with his shoulders hunched when he heard that Harry loved him. All those were shields because Harry had already found someone he loved to the point of madness, and Alto didn't have the power to either give him back to Harry or change Harry's mind about him.

She fell back from him, her face so bright with fear that Harry's shields almost wavered. He wished he could comfort her, he wished he didn't have to make anyone look like that, he had used Dark magic himself and he didn't think it worthy of the punishments that the Ministry liked to hand out—

But then he felt the scrape of the flaw against him again, and remembered. He closed in on Alto, and snapped out the spells he needed.

"_Expelliarmus._" Her wand went flying from her hand, a precaution. She was far deadlier without it than with. Most twisted were.

"_Incarcerous._" The ropes bound her arms to her sides, and she tilted her head back against the pressure of the ones around her neck, her throat working.

Harry stopped in front of her, and rested his wand right above the pulse.

She stared at him, and her grey eyes were like Draco's, and shit, the flaw was edging into him even though he was aware of it. Harry gritted his teeth. He had to fight it only long enough to kill her, which would be easy, this close.

"I didn't know," Alto said, and her voice had sobs threaded all through it. "I promise, if I'd known it I would have _stopped _it, if I had to kill myself. I never wanted to hurt anyone else. I never wanted to make them hurt _me_."

"I know," Harry said. Her flaw dragged that much gentleness out of him.

"And I only touched those who had some connection to the Dark themselves," Alto whispered on. "I promise. I never—I never knew, I could only have made them become twisted if they had the potential. Have you thought about the way that Draco turns his head in reaction to Dark magic? Have you thought—"

Harry shook his head. "Don't mention him again," he said quietly.

Alto fell silent and stared at him. "I'm sorry," she said. "For so many things."

Harry held her eyes as he whispered, "_Diffindo_," and watched the line of red open across her jugular. He owed her that much.

Or her flaw convinced him he did. He stepped away from her body as she slumped, not understanding what had made him feel like that.

He turned around. The shield that had held Draco back was gone, but he scrambled across on all fours and knelt over Alto's body instead of attacking Harry. He put out one hand as though to touch her wound, and then pulled it back and cradled it to his chest. He was making ragged sounds under his breath.

Harry turned to Holinshead, nodding to her. "Thanks for your help," he said.

"I did little enough, in the end," Holinshead said, and smiled at him.

Harry fell a step back. He would have said, before, that her eyes were a dull grey, not so different from Alto's in color. But they shone now. They shone like stars.

They shone blue.

"What are you?" he whispered.

Holinshead chuckled and bowed to him. "Someone you recognize, I see," she said. "And someone willing to work with you in order to eliminate a rival. Remember that." She looked past him at Alto's body and spat. "Someone who can possess other twisted, but not only that."

_He was after Alto because she could make twisted, and somehow that threatens him._

"The Veritaserum—"

"The body and mind I'm in now _did _want to avenge their sister." Holinshead, or the twisted wearing Holinshead's body, glanced at him. "Sometimes I take them willing." She bent closer, and her smile was a dragon's. "Other times, not. Remember me."

And Harry felt the passage overhead of something like a dragon's downbeating wings, and Holinshead staggered and blinked, saying in a different voice, "What happened? Did—did I help Sarah?"

Harry couldn't bring himself to explain for the moment. He looked back at Draco, who still wasn't touching Alto, but was still crouched over her. He made no noise, now. His face looked like washed marble when he raised it.

_Sometimes, I hate this job, _Harry thought, and turned away, to leave Malfoy his privacy, while he answered Holinshead's questions.


	10. Aftermath

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of _Sister Healer. _The sequel, and next fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, will be a one-shot called "Working With Them."

_Chapter Ten-Aftermath_

"You have no idea how much trouble you're in."

Harry stared at his hands, and shrugged limply. He didn't see what right Okazes had to scold him. He was the one who had agreed that Harry could work without a partner, and if the consequences of that were hitting him now-namely, that he might be held responsible for the pain Harry had suffered-he shouldn't take it out on Harry.

"What were you thinking, killing that many twisted and not investigating the root causes of the case? When you have that many twisted approaching one woman, the case requires the efforts of _all _the Socrates Aurors..."

Harry stared at the far wall and let the words wash over him. Okazes could bitch all he liked. Harry had stayed up late writing his reports (and being pleased that his reattached finger, at least at the moment, worked as well as ever). He had listened to Malfoy's monosyllabic requests for silence and solitude, and obeyed them. He had contacted Alto's family and the Healers at St. Mungo's and explained what happened. He had sent a special report on the blue-eyed twisted to the Head Auror, where it would probably languish unread, because nothing that the Ministry's trouble child got involved in could possibly be worthwhile.

Okazes came to the end of his speech, or at least so the sudden silence said. Harry drew himself up, and replied with as much calm dignity as he could muster. "Sir. You wish for several reports on the deaths of all the separate twisted, or only one report on all of them?"

"_One _report. Are you deaf?" Okazes waved him away with a tight fistful of sheets of parchment that rustled like muted screams. "Get out of my sight."

"Yes, sir," Harry said, with a fast little bow that Okazes would have had to look at more closely to see the mockery in. Since he was already turning away, with his nose projecting into the air, Harry doubted he would. He left the office, standing in the corridor a moment so he could close his eyes and let some of the weariness drop away.

He had to write the report, sure. But he could do it tomorrow. He had already labored too much for the Ministry today, and he recognized the hollow feeling inside him that wasn't hunger. If he spent any more time here, if he had to look at one more pair of uncomprehending eyes or listen to one more twittering voice, he'd go mental. He had to go by his office to pick up official parchment for writing the report, but then he could leave.

Except that, when he returned to the office, Malfoy was there, leaning one hip on his desk. He stood up when Harry entered and used a quick spell to shut the door. Listening closely, Harry heard it lock.

_Well. All right, then._

He felt the weariness burn away like dust to flame as he approached Malfoy. It seemed that, if he needed an enemy to fight, Malfoy intended to give him one.

* * *

_He looks as though he's fought a squadron of dragons._

Draco didn't intend to let that keep him from doing what had to be done, of course. Potter had strength in seemingly endless quantities. To keep him from wasting that strength in the future, distrusting Draco and trying to keep secrets from him, Draco would insist on an expenditure now.

"I never thanked you for killing Alto when I couldn't," he said.

Potter blinked at him. He didn't expect the thanks, said the first blink; he couldn't imagine why Draco would have lingered merely to speak to him about that, said the second; didn't Draco have a home to go to? said the third.

Draco did, but he had no one there save a portrait who would ask too many questions. No welcoming letters. No Floo chiming with incoming firecalls. And he saw no reason to let this go, to permit Potter to put walls up between them and only knock them down in those rare moments they worked together and forgot to fight. He would die that way, and so would his partner.

It was a matter of course that he wouldn't permit the first death to happen. It had surprised him how fiercely he did not desire the second.

"You're welcome," Potter said at last, in a graceless mumble. This wasn't the man who had approached and killed Alto, fighting off her flaw where Draco succumbed to it. Draco wondered how many different sides there were to Potter, how many he flaunted and how many hid.

And how many he would ever be permitted to see.

"That reminds me," Potter added, and sudden energy flowered out of him, like a rose on the eve of summer. He strode across to his own desk and took a piece of parchment out of it, turning it around so it was braced in front of him like a shield. "I need your signature on this."

Draco recognized the shapes of the letters already written on it even from this distance. He locked his arms and stared at Potter in silence.

"What?" Potter snapped. He tossed his head up like a restless hound, and Draco wondered for a moment what he would look like in a leash and collar. _Wrong, _his mind snapped back, and he shook his head, dismissing the vision, never to return. "You know you have no good reason not to sign it now. We're not in St. Mungo's, you're not under a twisted's flaw, you hate me-"

"I don't hate you," Draco said softly. "I want to rebuild this partnership."

"And you think that would _work_?"

In those words, Draco heard all the compressed emotion, heavy as black dirt, of someone who had been abandoned, and pushed aside, and pissed on, and hated, and distrusted, and banned from hospitals, and told himself he didn't need anyone anyway, and made things worse for himself-all the doubt and outrage that pointed to Draco leaving him behind, because he couldn't imagine anything else.

Draco wouldn't let Potter make other people's problems his own, though. _He _hadn't done those things, and he wouldn't let Potter get away with saying he had. He folded his arms and yawned, loud and long and deliberately offensive. "I don't want another partner," he said.

Potter stared at him, and then shook his head. "A new partnership would give you a fresh start, as well as me," he said. "What happens if I can never overcome the vision of you torturing me, and abandon you or don't guard your back well in some situation that gets you killed?"

Draco didn't answer immediately, because he had to study Potter's face and work through the sense of his words rather than simply attack. "That's your particular nightmare," he said at last. "Failing your partner."

"I should _say_ so," Potter said. "After Lionel."

"You didn't fail him," Draco said. He had read enough of the official report on Potter and Vane's last case and picked through enough of what Potter had told him yesterday to be sure of that.

Potter bared his teeth. "You don't think so? If I'd kept my stupid feelings to myself, the way I should have, he wouldn't have felt the need to go off and investigate on his own. He would have thought he could trust me to watch his back instead of ogle his arse."

Draco snorted in spite of himself, but shook his head. "You couldn't know he'd react that way. Unless you want to blame yourself for not knowing him well enough to anticipate his reaction?"

Potter remained silent, looking past Draco with that vague, bored stare that he had seen so often since he partnered with the git. He had thought once that Potter used it when he wished to ignore something Draco said, but he knew now it was a way of preventing his own engagement in the conversation.

"You do," Draco said. "You stupid wanker, don't you realize that doesn't _work_? You can't prevent all your partner's actions. You can't anticipate them. Next you'll tell me that you feel guilty for exposing me to Alto during the fight, when you couldn't have known she would show up just then."

Potter's eyelids flickered. Draco had to sit down. He shook his head. "How have you lived with yourself like this? How do you keep from collapsing with the guilt every time someone gets hurt?"

"Most people, I'm not responsible for," Potter said, the sound of grinding teeth in the back of his voice. "But I feel guilty for getting my partner hurt for the same reason I'd feel guilty for abandoning a victim I was guarding and someone sneaking in and hurting them in the meantime. You're fighting beside me. You're supposed to be able to depend on my reflexes, and my instincts, or why did they give me this job?"

Draco closed his eyes. "And would you expect me to feel the same guilt about hurting you? Particularly when I was the instrument of that pain, rather than simply failing to anticipate what would happen with Alto?"

Silence. Potter grinding his teeth was fairly audible, though.

"Explain to me why it's different," Draco said, opening his eyes and studying him again. "Why do you get a monopoly on the guilt?"

"I don't think your last partner died because you were careless," Potter said, glaring at him as though Draco had made him swallow a Vomiting Potion. "I know the file is sealed and I can't actually _read _about the Sussex Necromancer case, but so far, you've taken better care of me than I have of you."

Draco rolled his head on his neck. "I tortured you, and you wanted to get rid of me to the point that you didn't care if I wounded you," he offered. "Let's say that the guilt is split both ways and equally, all right?"

"I should have realized something was wrong when you insisted on staying in her hospital room with her," Potter muttered, apparently pursuing a different conversation entirely. "Because you don't trust people that easily, you don't fall in love with them at first sight, and you were gone so many times longer than you meant to be."

"Neither of us could have anticipated a twisted with Alto's unique gift and the unique way she had of affecting me," Draco said. "Stop saying we could have."

Potter touched his fringe, as if to soothe the burn of his scar. Draco kept from touching his Dark Mark in response. He knew Potter wasn't feeling the Dark Lord's return. He was probably indicating all sorts of things about how he felt like a hero and he felt responsible for what happened to other people in some secret language Draco could understand better if he knew more about Potter's past.

"I don't understand," Potter said softly to his hands. "You're willing to forgive me?"

"Who in your life hasn't been?" Draco asked. "Your friends must be. I don't ask you to think of me as a friend, but as a partner, with some of the same privileges," he added, because, knowing Potter, he would take the worst understanding of Draco's wording possible.

Potter didn't seem to have heard what he could take offense to. He looked up with blank, bright eyes, and stared past Draco's head again. Then he shrugged and dropped the form he held into the dustbin.

"Right," he said. "So we begin again, and try to trust each other. Try to be partners, not simply people thrown together by the Ministry to work on cases." He surveyed Draco warily for a moment, as if he thought that Draco would object to _his _wording.

"We do," Draco agreed. "And part of that is telling me what you know about this twisted with blue eyes who was possessing the others."

* * *

Harry nodded and sat down in the chair behind his desk. He should have known it would come to this sooner or later, and perhaps he should have told Malfoy the truth some time ago, when he had first met that twisted. It would have saved trouble and scrambling now.

Why hadn't he told Malfoy about that twisted, come to think of it? It wasn't a secret he particularly wanted to keep, and the blue-eyed creature had appeared for the first time at the end of their previous case, the Larkin case. He had never made a solid decision to stay silent about it.

_You don't make solid decisions about anything. That's the trouble. You simply stay quiet, and then when you think about it again, the best time has gone by._

Harry shook the cobwebby thoughts out of his head and focused on Malfoy, who was waiting. Malfoy sat with his hands laid flat on his knees, his face very nearly as flat, as wooden. Well, Harry couldn't help him with that, but he would try to make the wooden look go away later.

"I saw the blue eyes when I was reporting to Okazes at the end of the Larkin case," he said.

Malfoy, without shifting a muscle of his body, made Harry feel the force of the outrage and betrayal that sang through him. Harry turned his head to the side.

"You distrusted me that much, even then," Malfoy whispered, "to think I wouldn't believe you about a mutual enemy."

"I didn't trust anyone," Harry said, licking his teeth so they wouldn't snap shut and make him have to speak through them. "Not you, not Ron, not Hermione, not Okazes. I didn't tell my friends about the blue-eyed thing, either."

"Why not?"

Malfoy's voice was clearer now, which gave Harry some hope he would listen. Studying the wall so he would know in an instant if an enemy ever drugged him and dumped him here wrapped in ropes, he said, "Because it didn't occur to me. And because I don't talk much about the job to them, not since Lionel died. Too many secrets to keep. Too many questions they could ask that would lead straight to something more sensitive."

Ticking silence. He thought Malfoy would make a remark about Mudbloods, or return to the topic of Okazes.

Instead, he said, "They don't know about what Vane meant to you, what it did to you when he died."

Harry whipped his head around, eyes narrowing. "Neither do you," he said, and now his teeth _had _snapped shut. "You heard the desperate confession I made to break you free from Alto's power. No more than that."

Malfoy leaned forwards, hands still on his knees, and stared so long and so hard at Harry that Harry wouldn't have been surprised to find eyeholes burned in his forehead. His voice, when he spoke, seemed to come from a long distance off.

"You told me more than you intended to, then. I know about your obsession, and I know about what it would have done to you to have that obsession torn away. I know about this bleeding hole you carry around with you, the one that fills you with guilt and conviction that you'll never do right again. I know you think that you've already decided to go the rest of your life without love and sex because of what Vane was to you-even though it's only been a month since he died."

"I don't _think_ that," Harry said. Yes, it had been as he'd thought. He'd told Malfoy the truth, and Malfoy had only remembered it to mock him later. "I _know _that. I _believe _it."

Malfoy went on, linking his fingers together now, in a posture Harry thought it likely he probably used when he was trying to teach younger Aurors something. "You think that, because it's too early for you to know whether you can keep the vow. A month of deep grief, fine. But you've talked to no one but me about this. What does it say, Potter, that you can tell the person you trust least the deepest truth of your life right now?"

Harry snapped his teeth together on his own this time. "That I was trying to save your life, whether or not you'll ever thank me for it."

Malfoy's head darted down then, and it was a long pause before he went on, long enough that Harry could feel his lungs quivering with his breath.

"Yes, that's true," Malfoy whispered. "It's _true _that you don't care much about yourself. You'll use the truth as a blanket or a bandage or a weapon, anything to keep someone else safe and distant from you."

Harry cocked his head. Malfoy sounded different now, but he didn't know why. That was only putting into different words the things Harry had already told him.

Malfoy looked back up now, and his face was set and grim. "I believe that you were going to speak to someone after the Larkin case, someone who could help you with your grief-and your tendency to rush heedlessly into things as you did on that case. Did you?"

"I didn't rush into things on this case," Harry countered. "I didn't have the time. Alto came seeking us, and we planned the assault on Jerome together, and-"

"I didn't ask that," Malfoy said. "I asked whether you had spoken to anyone, the way you promised to and the Ministry required."

Harry gritted his teeth. "I didn't intend to forget," he said. "I just forgot. It happens."

To his blinking astonishment, Malfoy nodded, accepting that. "Yes, all right. But I'm reminding you of the necessity now. Are you going to talk to someone?"

"If you do," Harry said. "You need the same things I do. To talk to someone about your sadness over Daphne. To talk about going mad. To talk about experiencing the direct power of a twisted on your mind and body."

* * *

_And then there are times that Potter's commitment to candor and honesty does nothing but anger me._

Draco spent a few moments simply _breathing_ and staring at the far wall before he nodded. "I will not put it off," he said. "And I think we should keep each other informed of our progress."

Potter smiled at him. "I can agree with that. Do you have a particular Mind-Healer you would recommend, or should we take our chances and see what the Ministry pairs us with?"

"I was going to St. Mungo's," Draco began, and stopped.

Potter reached out to capture his hand, exactly as if they had been friends for years and he had the right. Well, Draco hadn't told him that he didn't, so perhaps he assumed he did. "I don't think that's the best choice right now, for either of us," he said quietly. "Not to mention that my ban is probably still in effect, and the last thing we need when we're looking for someone to help heal our minds is to struggle through challenges and sidelong glares. Now. Do you know a Mind-Healer who works for the Ministry that you would recommend?"

Draco blinked for a moment, and then swallowed. It seemed Potter was perfectly happy to go ahead with the counseling now that he had someone who had reminded him of it and would insist on it. Draco had thought he was lying even when he claimed to have simply forgotten. Because how in the world could he _not _have remembered the promise and evaded it on purpose? Promising something to a Slytherin would mean nothing to the vast majority of Gryffindors, after all.

But this was more proof that Potter was telling the truth, that he had simply forgotten.

Which implied a level of casual carelessness about himself that Draco wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Perhaps he would, however, after they had spoken to their chosen Mind-Healer. And he did want to keep this partnership. He shook his head and said, "No. I have never had occasion to resort to them."

Potter nodded as though he had expected that—perhaps he had, based on what Draco had said in the past—and pulled his hand away. "Then I trust you to find one that we can both go to," he said, and turned around as if he would go back to his work and leave Draco sitting on the chair between their two desks alone.

"That's it?" Draco asked.

"What?" Potter glanced at him, already sorting through what looked like a half-complete report and a stack of files from St. Mungo's. Draco wondered where and why he had got them, and then wanted to smack himself. For checking on the truth of Alto's story and the twisted in her past, of course. "Well, yes. If you think we need to do something else to heal my mental wounds—" he grimaced as if referring to them that way was distasteful "—then we can do it after talking to the Mind-Healer. But this is the only course I'm willing to commit to right now."

"That's not what I meant," Draco said roughly. "You would trust me to choose the Mind-Healer? Even given what I did to you?"

Potter gave him a direct glance, and his hands stopped sorting the paperwork for an instant. "You wanted to keep the partnership," he said. "I still think we're not suited to each other and the simplest course would be to end it."

Draco winced, the words piercing him the way Alto's words had pierced his mind.

"But you want to keep it, and I'm not opposed." Potter shrugged and turned back to the reports again, his voice muffled as though he was speaking through cotton. "I have to start showing that I trust you sometime. So, this."

He went back to searching, and Draco leaned back and closed his eyes, because letting someone else see his thoughts at the moment was not advisable.

So…

He had, possibly, gained a trusted partner, or someone who might become a trusted partner if they took care to learn about each other instead of snapping and retreating. He already knew they worked well together on the battlefield. The ultimate challenge would be seeing what happened as the months wore on and Potter began to forget about the scar on his finger, began to look at Draco with different eyes and forget that he had tortured him.

If he could.

If they would have the time to do such leisurely exploration, with the blue-eyed twisted hunting for them.

Draco tightened his muscles. He had lost many things in his life, more than he wanted to admit—his parents' regard, his fiancée, his self-respect for a time given how easily Alto had leaped into his mind—but he would cling all the more tightly to the things he still retained. His Auror career. His continuing life.

Potter's trust.

He stood and went to look at the list of Mind-Healers.

**The End.**


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